George Sinclair (mathematician)

The first Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow, he is known for Satan's Invisible World Discovered, (c. 1685), a work on witchcraft, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena.

He wrote in all three areas of his interests, including an account of the "Glenluce Devil", a poltergeist case from c. 1654, in a 1672 book mainly on hydrostatics but also a pioneering study of geological structures through his experience in coal mines.

[14] Historian David Damrosch has noted that Alexander Agnew commonly called the "Jock of Broad Scotland" was the first person in Scottish history to publicly deny the existence of God.

[16] A long-neglected aspect deriving from Sinclair's work as a mineral surveyor is that the last part of Hydrostaticks - a short History of Coal - includes the first published geological cross section in which he treats the strata in purely geometric terms.

[5] The title of Gregory's pamphlet ridiculed Sinclair's 1669 book Ars Nova et Magna Gravitatis et Levitatis (The New and Great Art of Heaviness and Lightness).

An appendix to the work, Tentamina de motu penduli et projectorum,[18] was a more important essay on dynamics, regarded by D. T. Whiteside as a probable source of Isaac Newton’s theory of resisted motion.

It was in fact an English translation by Sinclair of the Latin inaugural dissertation given by David Dickson, who became Professor of Divinity, Glasgow in 1640, on the occasion in 1650 when he moved to Edinburgh.