Brook Taylor FRS (18 August 1685 – 29 December 1731) was an English mathematician and barrister best known for several results in mathematical analysis.

Taylor's Methodus Incrementorum Directa et Inversa (1715) ("Direct and Indirect Methods of Incrementation") added a new branch to higher mathematics, called "calculus of finite differences".

[5][6] The same work contains the well-known Taylor's theorem, the importance of which remained unrecognized until 1772, when Joseph-Louis Lagrange realized its usefulness and termed it "the main foundation of differential calculus".

In the same year, Taylor sat on the committee for adjudicating the claims of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.

Unfinished treatises written on his return from Aix-la-Chapelle in 1719, On the Jewish Sacrifices and On the Lawfulness of Eating Blood, were afterwards found among his papers.

The marriage led to an estrangement with his father, which improved in 1723 after Taylor's wife died in childbirth while giving birth to a son.

Taylor's grandson, Sir William Young, printed a posthumous work entitled Contemplatio Philosophica for private circulation in 1793, (2nd Bart., 10 January 1815).