Thomas Simpson

Thomas Simpson (1710 to 1761) was an English mathematician from Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. The son of a weaver, he received little formal education, took up weaving himself and taught himself mathematics, then worked as a schoolmaster in Nuneaton before settling in London, where he lectured in coffee houses and joined the Spitalfields Mathematical Society. In 1743 he became head of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society two years later and of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1758. He is best remembered for his work on interpolation and numerical integration, and his name is attached to Simpson's rule, although he acknowledged that he learned the method from Newton. He also gave the modern iterative form of the Newton-Raphson method, wrote textbooks on the calculus of fluxions, and worked on probability and the theory of errors, where he argued that the mean of several observations is better than a single one.