John Collins (mathematician)

John Collins (born March 25, 1625 in Wood Eaton near Oxford , Oxfordshire , † November 10, 1683 in London ) was an English mathematician. Due to the extensive correspondence with the leading mathematicians in Europe, Collins became one of the hubs of scientific discourse in the 17th century.

life and work

John Collins was the son of a minister in Charles I's reign . He attended grammar school , but had to leave it after the death of his father in 1638 to earn a living at a bookseller in Oxford. In 1641 Collins received a position as clerk at the court Charles I, which had evaded from London to Oxford. From 1642, after the beginning of the civil war , the court resided at Christ's College in Oxford. Collins found the opportunity to do math here.

Like John Evelyn or Robert Moray , Collins, like many other people close to the court, fled England for several years. For seven years he worked as a seaman in the service of the Republic of Venice , which mobilized troops against the Ottoman Empire . In the state of war that prevailed from 1645 to 1670, the aim was to secure Crete , the Signoria's last trading base in the eastern Mediterranean. During this time, Collins tried to continue his mathematical studies.

After the end of the Civil War, Collins returned to England in 1649. As a math teacher he worked in London until the end of Cromwell's reign in 1660. After Charles II, who fled into exile in Holland and France in 1646, was enthroned , Collins worked as an accountant for various organizations. In 1667 Collins became a member of the Royal Society, which had been established five years earlier . The institution that emerged from the Society for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning to promote experimental philosophy through the privilege of Charles II in 1660 was under the influence of Robert Moray and John Maitland, 1st Duke of Lauderdale . As a librarian, Collins was one of the first royal officials, alongside its president Samuel Pepys and secretary Henry Oldenburg .

During the plague epidemic in 1665 and after the Great Fire in 1666, Collins worked as an accountant, in the Excise Office from (1668-70) and between (1670-72) in the Brookhouse . During this time, Collins published the works of Isaac Barrow and John Wallis . Barrow later compared the importance of Collins to England with that of Marin Mersenne in France.

In the fall of 1668, Collins published a treatise on the Algebra ofte Stelkonst published by Mercator’s 1668 . The series of natural logarithms described therein was a novel algebraic method. At the request of Collins and Seth Ward , the edition of Logarithmotechnia, translated into Latin, appeared in 1669 . The further occupation with nautical maps by Edward Wright led Collins to the description of logarithmic connections of parallels and course equivalents Loxodromes . These became part of the Mercator projection developed by Mercator .

After the decline in his income from these activities, he entered the service of the newly formed royal Council of trade and plantations in 1672 .

In 1671 Collins moved to Westminster (London) and shortly afterwards married Bellona Austin, the daughter of General William Austin, who served as Queen's laundress of the English Queen Catherine Henrietta of Braganza at court. Under the mint master Henry Slingsby (1667-1684) Collins received a position in the Farthing Office from September 1672 . The Farthing Office was part of the Royal Mint and introduced half-penny copper coins in the same year .

Collins maintained extensive correspondence with English and Scottish scholars such as Barrow, David and James Gregory , Isaac Newton and Wallis. But also to European scholars such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli , Christiaan Huygens , René François Walther de Sluze , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus . Collins met the twenty-four-year-old Tschirnhaus in 1675 during his three-month visit to the Royal Society in London. After the conversation, Collins wrote to Gregory and described Tschirnhaus as […] the most knowing algebraist in Europe. The following year Leibniz stayed in London. The meeting of Leibniz with Collins and other correspondence from the Collins estate formed important aspects in the Royal Society's evidence proceedings for Newton's claimed authorship of the infinitesimal calculus .

Collins traveled to Oxford in 1683 to plan a canal connection between the Isis , the upper reaches of the Thames in Oxford, and the Avon, which runs west of it. During the trip, which was intended to take stock and assess the course of the canal, Collins contracted food poisoning from which he did not recover and died as a result.

Fonts (selection)

Collins left a collection of about 2000 books and innumerable manuscripts and letters. The archive was acquired from William Jones . In his writings he dealt with issues of trigonometry, navigation, cartography or the use of quadrants as well as economic problems of tin mining.

• An introduction to merchant's accounts . 1652.
• The sector on a quadrant . 1658.
• Geometrical dialing . 1659.
• The mariner's plain scale new plained . 1659.
• Doctrine of Decimal Arithmetick . 1664.

literature

• DT Whiteside : Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography . New York 1970–1990.
• HS Allen: James Gregory, John Collins, and Some Early Scientific Instruments . In: Nature . Volume 121, 1928, p. 456.
• AR Hall : John Collins on Newton's telescope . In: Notes and Records Roy. Soc. London . Volume 49, No. 1, 1995, pp. 71-78.
• John Collins . In: Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 4, 1917, pp. 824-825.
• Charles Hutton: John Collins . In: A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary . Volume I, London 1795.
• HW Turnbull : James Gregory Memorial Volume . London 1939.
• HW Turnbull: Early Scottish Relations with the Royal Society: I. James Gregory, FRS (1638-1675) . The Royal Society, 1940.

Remarks

1. ↑ Turnbull, 1939, p. 315.

Web links

• Entry to Collins; John (1625-1683); Mathematician in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
• John Collins biography
• John Collins manuscripts