John Craig (mathematician)

He is known for his book Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology), published in 1698.

In the aforementioned book, Craig presents a formula that describes how the probability of a historical event depends on the number of primary witnesses, on the chain of transmission through secondary witnesses, on the elapsed time and on the spatial distance.

Using this formula, Craig derived that the probability of the story of Jesus would reach 0 in the year 3150.

Craig was involved in developing the concept of Hyperbolic logarithm and in 1710 published “Logarithmotechnica generalis” in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

By way of illustration he gives the Mercator series for the logarithm (denoted l.) without mention of radius of convergence: “Exemplar 1.