Nicholas Saunderson

Nicholas Saunderson was a blind English scientist and mathematician, born at Thurlstone in Yorkshire on 20 January 1682 and dead on 19 April 1739, the fourth Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He lost his sight to smallpox at about a year old but learned arithmetic by helping his father, an excise man, and read the engravings on tombstones by touch. He studied at Penistone Grammar School, was taught algebra and geometry by a tutor in 1700 and attended Attercliffe Academy. Arriving in Cambridge in 1707, he was allowed by the Lucasian professor William Whiston to lecture on mathematics, astronomy and optics, and Queen Anne gave him a master's degree in 1711 so that he could succeed Whiston, whom he did the next day. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1718 and a doctor of laws in 1728, and one historian of statistics thinks he may have been the earliest discoverer of Bayes' theorem. He died of scurvy.