Charles Hutton FRS FRSE LLD (14 August 1737 – 27 January 1823) was an English mathematician and surveyor.

Hutton was born on Percy Street in Newcastle upon Tyne[1] in the north of England, the son of a superintendent of mines, who died when he was still very young.

Following Ivison's promotion to a church living, Hutton took over the Jesmond school, which, in consequence of his increasing number of pupils, he relocated to nearby Stotes Hall, since demolished.

While he taught during the day at Stotes Hall, which overlooked Jesmond Dene, he studied mathematics in the evening at a school in Newcastle.

[3] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in July, 1774[5] He was asked by the society to perform the calculations necessary to work out the mass and density of the earth from the results of the Schiehallion experiment – a set of observations of the gravitational pull of a mountain in Perthshire made by the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne,[6] in 1774–76.

[9] He had previously begun a small periodical called Miscellane Mathematica, of which only 13 numbers appeared; he subsequently published five volumes of The Diarian Miscellany which contained substantial extracts from the Diary.

The subscription exceeded the amount necessary, and a medal was also produced, engraved by Benjamin Wyon, showing Hutton's head on one side and emblems representing his discoveries about the force of gunpowder, and the density of the earth on the other.