William Braikenridge

William Braikenridge, also spelled Brakenridge (about 1700 to 1762), was a Scottish mathematician and cleric who became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752. He was the son of John Braikenridge of Glasgow and taught mathematics in Edinburgh in the 1720s. Marischal College gave him an honorary A.M. in 1735 and a D.D. in 1739, he was incorporated at The Queen's College, Oxford, in 1741, and he later became rector of St Michael Bassishaw in London and, from 1745, librarian of Sion College. In geometry, the Braikenridge-Maclaurin theorem is named partly for him: he published it in 1733 in his Exercitatio Geometrica de Descriptione Linearum Curvarum, and because Colin Maclaurin had independently discovered it, it occasioned a priority dispute. He also wrote in the Philosophical Transactions on the number of inhabitants within the London Bills of Mortality, arguing that London's population had peaked a decade earlier.