Henry Briggs (mathematician)

After studying Latin and Greek at a local grammar school, he entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1577, and graduated in 1581.

He lectured there for nearly 23 years, and made Gresham College a centre of English mathematics, from which he supported the new ideas of Johannes Kepler.

[7] At this time, Briggs obtained a copy of Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, in which Napier introduced the idea of logarithms.

It has also been suggested that he knew of the method outlined in Fundamentum Astronomiae published by the Swiss clockmaker Jost Bürgi, through John Dee.

Dr Smith, in his Lives of the Gresham Professors, characterizes him as a man of great probity, a condemner of riches, and contented with his own station, preferring a studious retirement to all the splendid circumstances of life.

In 1624 his Arithmetica Logarithmica was published, in folio, a work containing the logarithms of thirty thousand natural numbers to fourteen decimal places[10] (1-20,000 and 90,001 to 100,000).

[13] Some other works, as his Commentaries on the Geometry of Peter Ramus, and Remarks on the Treatise of Longomontanus respecting the Quadrature of the Circle were not published.