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William Oughtred (5 March 1574 – 30 June 1660), [1] also Owtred, Uhtred, etc., was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. [2] [3] [4] After John Napier discovered logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales (lines, or rules) upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and ...
Clavis mathematicae (English: The Key of Mathematics) is a mathematics book written by William Oughtred, originally published in 1631 in Latin.It was an attempt to communicate the contemporary mathematical practices, and the European history of mathematics, into a concise and digestible form.
In 1630, William Oughtred of Cambridge invented a circular slide rule, and in 1632 combined two handheld Gunter rules to make a device that is recognizably the modern slide rule. Like his contemporary at Cambridge, Isaac Newton , Oughtred taught his ideas privately to his students.
Thomas Harriot's Artis analyticae praxis, published ten years posthumously, and William Oughtred's Clavis mathematicae. Both contributed to the evolution of modern mathematical language; the former introduced the × {\displaystyle \times } sign for multiplication and (::) sign for proportion.
June 30 – William Oughtred, English mathematician who invented the slide rule (born 1574) Jean-Jacques Chifflet , French physician and antiquary (born 1588 ) Walter Rumsey , Welsh judge and amateur scientist (born 1584 )
William Oughtred publishes Clavis Mathematicae, introducing the multiplication sign (×) and proportion sign (::). [1] [2] Some of Thomas Harriot's writings on algebra are published posthumously as Artis Analyticae Praxis.
The slide rule is invented by William Oughtred (1574–1660), an English mathematician, and later becomes the calculating tool of choice until the electronic calculator takes over in the early 1970s. [ 1 ]
His contributions include his use of e to represent the base of natural logarithms. It is not known exactly why e was chosen, but it was probably because the first four letters of the alphabet were already commonly used to represent variables and other constants. Euler consistently used to represent pi.