The Arithmetic of Infinites: A School Introduction to the Integral Calculus

Extract

Dr. John Wallis, who lived through the greater part of the seventeenth century (1616-1703), was a typical child of that energetic age. Son of a Kentish parson, he began his academic career at Cambridge, but ended as Savilian professor at Oxford. He was a scholar who apparently read mathematics in Arabic as easily as he wrote on them in Latin; a founder of the Royal Society; a grammarian; and (needless to say) a vigorous theologian. Into the middle of his famous Algebra he “spatch-cocked” (with apologies for its irrelevance) one of the earliest modern inquiries in experimental psychology : in the course of a sleepless night he had amused himself by extracting mentally the square root of 3 to 20 places and, a month later, showed in the presence of a distinguished foreigner that he could remember the result correctly. Nor did these accomplishments exhaust his versatility For as a supporter of the Parliamentarians he confounded the Royalists by his astonishing facility in unravelling their cipher messages. Those who are offended by his adherence to the cause of the Parliament may be reconciled by the knowledge that he was one of the remonstrants against the execution of the King—a defection which, happily, did not blind the authorities to his great merits when the Savilian professorship fell vacant in the following year.