John Keill

John Keill was a Scottish mathematician, natural philosopher and cryptographer, born in Edinburgh on 1 December 1671 and dead in London on 31 August 1721, an important defender of Isaac Newton. He studied at Edinburgh under David Gregory, took his bachelor's degree in 1692 and an MA at Balliol College, Oxford in 1694. As lecturer in experimental philosophy at Hart Hall he taught Newtonian laws of motion, hydrostatics and optics through experiments, methods that his student John Theophilus Desaguliers continued. His Examination of Dr. Burnet's Theory of the Earth of 1698 attacked Burnet, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes and Malebranche, and he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1700. In 1711 he became decypherer to Queen Anne, and from 1712 he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. He served as Newton's chief defender in the dispute over Leibniz and the invention of calculus. His Trigonometriae Planae et Sphaericae Elementa appeared in 1715.