John Colson

John Colson was an English clergyman and mathematician, born in 1680 and dead on 20 January 1760, who held the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge from 1739 to 1760. Educated at Lichfield School, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford but left without a degree, became a schoolmaster at Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Rochester and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1713. He served as vicar of Chalk in Kent from 1724 to 1740, later lectured at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and was also rector of Lockington in Yorkshire. In 1726 he published his Negativo-Affirmativo Arithmetik, which advocated a modified decimal system in which the large digits were replaced by small figures, a method now called signed-digit representation. He translated several of Newton's works into English, including De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum in 1736.