Seth Ward (bishop of Salisbury)

Seth Ward was an English mathematician, astronomer and bishop, born in Hertfordshire in 1617 and dying on 6 January 1689. Educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he took his B.A. in 1636 and M.A. in 1640 and became a fellow, was chosen university mathematical lecturer in 1643, and lost his fellowship the next year for opposing the Solemn League and Covenant. In the 1640s he took instruction in mathematics from William Oughtred. In 1649 he became Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford and gained a high reputation for his theory of planetary motion, set out in his inquiry against Ismael Boulliau's cosmology in 1653 and in his Astronomia geometrica of 1656, on the system of Kepler. He conducted a long controversy with Thomas Hobbes alongside John Wallis, and with John Wilkins wrote the Vindiciae academiarum. In 1660 he became a founding fellow of the Royal Society.