John Napier of Merchiston
W. Brownlie Hendry describes how a sixteenth-century Scottish laird, with, in Gibbon's words, ‘a head to contrive and a hand to execute,’ worked out the powerful aid to mathematical calculation known as logarithms.
Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, Scotland had contributed little to scientific invention in general and in particular to mathematical science. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the second decade of the century, from this country of proud lairds and clan chiefs, where fighting and religious controversy occupied the lives of his contemporaries, one of their number produced a book revealing an invention that immediately took rank as one of the landmarks of scientific discovery.
It came as one of the first great flourishes of the new learning that was soon to lay the foundations of a sound and ordered development of scientific ideas such as the medieval world had not known. It announced one of the greatest mathematical discoveries ever made, and although the contents of the book greatly accelerated the course of the first Scientific Revolution, the name of its author has little or no mention in many of the works on Scottish history.
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