John Collins (mathematician)

Apprenticed at the age of sixteen to Thomas Allam, a bookseller, living outside the Turl Gate of Oxford, he was driven to quit the trade by the troubles of the time, and accepted a clerkship in the employment of John Marr, clerk of the kitchen to the Prince of Wales.

With this employment went a house in Fenchurch Street, where he had thoughts of setting up a stationer's shop, and hoped 'to fall into the printing of books,' including some he himself designed to write, 'particularly one of the modern advancement of mathematical sciences, and an account of the best authors of that kind'.

With the failure of his arguments against the issue of tin farthings his office ceased, and he was glad subsequently to accept a small post as accountant to the Royal Fishery Company.

He had refused in March 1669 a situation offered to him in Ireland by the surveyor-general, Sir James Shaen, and about the same time married one of two daughters of William Austen, head cook to Charles II.

Collins was elected a fellow of the Royal Society 24 October 1667, and on 11 November of that year communicated an exposition of a theorem by the Jesuit Jacques de Billy.

[2] He contributed further An Account concerning the Resolution of Equations in Numbers, a survey of recent algebra improvements made in England, and A Solution of a Chorographical Problem; while a letter written to John Wallis, 3 October 1682, was imparted to the society 20 May 1684.

From it was selected and published in 1712, by order of the Royal Society, the Commercium Epistolicum, of material relevant to Newton's priority over Leibniz in the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus; specimens of results from the use of the fluxional method were transmitted 20 July 1669 through Barrow to Collins, and by him made widely known.