Thomas Simpson

[3] He moved with his wife and children to London at age twenty-five, where he supported his family by weaving during the day and teaching mathematics at night.

Simpson's treatise entitled The Nature and Laws of Chance and The Doctrine of Annuities and Reversions were based on the work of De Moivre and were attempts at making the same material more brief and understandable.

While he and De Moivre initially got along, De Moivre eventually felt that his income was threatened by Simpson's work and in his second edition of Annuities upon Lives, wrote in the preface:[5] "After the pains I have taken to perfect this Second Edition, it may happen, that a certain Person, whom I need not name, out of Compassion to the Public, will publish a Second Edition of his Book on the same Subject, which he will afford at a very moderate Price, not regarding whether he mutilates my Propositions, obscures what is clear, makes a Shew of new Rules, and works by mine; in short, confounds, in his usual way, every thing with a croud of useless Symbols; if this be the Case, I must forgive the indigent Author, and his disappointed Bookseller."

26–28, by the description of circular arcs at which the edges of the triangle ABC subtend an angle of pi/3; in the second part of the book, on pp.

Comparative attention might, however, usefully be drawn to a paper in English from eighty years earlier as suggesting that the underlying ideas were already recognised then: Of further related interest are problems posed in the early 1750s by J. Orchard, in The British Palladium, and by T. Moss, in The Ladies' Diary; or Woman's Almanack (at that period not yet edited by Simpson).

In 1971, Luc-Normand Tellier[8] found the first direct (non iterative) numerical solution of the Fermat and Simpson-Weber triangle problems.

Long before Von Thünen's contributions, which go back to 1818, the Fermat point problem can be seen as the very beginning of space economy.