William Oughtred

William Oughtred, also Owtred or Uhtred, born at Eton on 5 March 1574 or 1575 and dead on 30 June 1660, was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier discovered logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales on which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first known to use two such scales on separate rods sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division, and he is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622, a priority disputed with Richard Delamain. He also introduced the multiplication sign and the abbreviations sin and cos for the sine and cosine functions. The son of a writing-master, he was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, where he held a fellowship from 1595 to 1603, and left about 1603 to take church livings in Surrey.