Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 51, 2008



John Napier of Merchistoun (1550 – 4 April 1617) - also signed as Neper, Nepair - named Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish mathematician, physicist, astronomer/astrologer and 8th Laird of Merchistoun, son of Sir Archibald Napier of Merchiston. He is most remembered as the inventor of logarithms and Napier's bones, and for popularizing the use of the decimal point. Napier's birthplace, Merchiston Tower, Edinburgh, Scotland, is now part of Napier University. After dying of gout, Napier was buried in St Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh.

Napier is relatively most-known inside mathematical and engineering circles, where he made what is undoubtedly a key advance in the use of mathematics. Logarithms made calculations by hand much easier and quicker, and thereby opened the way to many later scientific advances. His work, Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, contained fifty-seven pages of explanatory matter and ninety pages of tables, which facilitated the furtherment of astronomy, dynamics, physics, and astrology. He also invented Napier's bones, a multiplication tool using a set of numbered rods.

Napier used some of his mathematical talents for theology, as he used the Book of Revelation to predict the Apocalypse, in A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John, which he regarded as his most important work.