He was also a member of the commission which decided the Calculus priority dispute between Leibniz and Newton in 1712.

[2] On 16 May 1713 he succeeded Alexander Torriano as professor of astronomy in Gresham College, and held the post until his death, which occurred in London on 9 June 1751.

A mass of his manuscripts is preserved by the Royal Astronomical Society; and writing to William Jones in 1727, he asserted his claim to the parliamentary reward of £10,000 for amending the lunar tables.

To compute π to 100 decimal places, he combined his formula with the Taylor series expansion for the inverse tangent.

Machin's formula remained the primary tool of pi-hunters for centuries (well into the computer era).