John Pell (mathematician)

John Pell was an English mathematician and political agent abroad, born at Southwick in West Sussex on 1 March 1611 and dying on 12 December 1685. Orphaned by the age of six, he was educated at Steyning Grammar School and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at thirteen, becoming an accomplished linguist and corresponding with Henry Briggs before taking his B.A. in 1629. He taught at Samuel Hartlib's short-lived Chichester Academy and in the 1630s worked on pedagogy, combinatorics and a proposal for a universal language. In mathematics he concentrated on widening the scope of algebra in the theory of equations and on mathematical tables, and printed his Idea of Mathematics in 1638. Elected to the chair of mathematics at Amsterdam in 1644, he was later made Royal Chair of Mathematics at Orange College by the Prince of Orange under the patronage of Sir Charles Cavendish, and was a compeer and correspondent of Descartes and Hobbes.