Andrew Scott Waugh

After studying at Edinburgh he joined Addiscombe Military Seminary in 1827 and was commissioned with the Bengal Engineers on 13 December of the same year.

He assisted Captain Hutchinson in establishing a foundry at Kashipur and became an adjutant of the Bengal sappers and miners on 13 April 1831.

In an era before the electronic computer, it then took many months for a team of humans to calculate, analyze and extrapolate the trigonometry involved.

According to accounts of the time,[2][3][4] it was 1852 when the team's leader of the human computers, Radhanath Sikdar, came to Waugh to announce that what had been labeled as "Peak XV" was the highest point in the region and most likely in the world.

Sikdar and Waugh checked their calculations again and again in order to make no mistake in them and then sent a message to Royal Geographical Society from their headquarters in Dehradun, where they found that Kangchenjunga is not the highest peak of the world.

[1] To ensure that there was no error, Waugh took his time and did not publish this result until 1856, when he also proposed that the peak be named Mount Everest in honor of his predecessor.

[11] Waugh noticed errors in the triangulation that appeared to be due to the attraction of the plumbline to the Himalayan mountains and approached the clergyman mathematician Archdeacon John Henry Pratt with the problem.