Briggs, Henry

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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b. February 1561 Warley Wood, Yorkshire, England

d. 26 January 1630 Oxford, England

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English mathematician who invented common, or Briggsian, logarithms and whose writings led to their general acceptance throughout Europe.

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After education at Warley Grammar School, Briggs entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1577 and became a fellow in 1588. Having been Reader of the Linacre Lecture in 1592, he was appointed to the new Chair in Geometry at Gresham House (subsequently Gresham College), London, in 1596. Shortly after, he concluded that the logarithms developed by John Napier would be much more useful if they were calculated to the decimal base 10, rather than to the base e (the "natural" number 2.71828…), a suggestion with which Napier concurred. Until the advent of modern computing these decimal logarithms were invaluable for the accurate calculations involved in surveying, navigation and astronomy. In 1619 he accepted the Savilian Chair in Geometry at Oxford University, having two years previously published the base 10 logarithms of 1,000 numbers. The year 1624 saw the completion of his monumental Arithmetica Logarithmica, which contained fourteen-figure logarithms of 30,000 numbers, together with their trigonometric sines to fifteen decimal places and their tangents and secants to ten places!

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Bibliography

1617, Logarithmorum Chilias Primi (the first published reference to base 10 logarithms). 1622, A Treatise of the North West Passage to the South Sea: Through the Continent of

Virginia and by Fretum Hudson.

1633, Arithmetica Logarithmica, Gouda, the Netherlands; pub. in 1633 as Trigonmetria Britannica, London.

Further Reading

E.T.Bell, 1937, Men of Mathematics, London: Victor Gollancz. See also Burgi, Jost.

KF