Briggs

Briggs, HENRY, a distinguished mathematician, was born in 1561, at Warley Wood, near Halifax, Yorkshire, and studied at St John's College, Cambridge. He took the degree of B.A. in 1581, that of M.A. in 1585, and obtained a fellowship in 1588. In 1592 he was appointed reader of the Physic Lecture founded by Dr Linaere, and in 1596 first reader in geometry at Gresham House (afterwards College), London, and in 1619 first Savilian professor of Astronomy in Oxford. This office he retained till the time of his death, which took place at Oxford, January 26, 1631. Briggs made an important contribution to the theory of logarithms, of which he constructed invaluable tables. Napier the inventor had in 1614 published a table of the so-called natural logarithms, when Briggs observed that another system, in which the logarithm of 10 should be taken as unity, would afford great facilities of calculation. In 1616 he visited Napier at Edinburgh to discuss the suggested improvement, and again in the following year, when Napier admitted the improvement on his own system. He published his Logarithmorum Chilias Prima in 1617, containing the first thousand natural numbers calculated to eight decimal places. He was also the author of a tract on the North-west Passage to the South Seas, by way of Virginia and Hudson Bay (1622); and in 1624 he published his Arithmetica Logarithmica, the fruit of many years of unwearied application, and giving the Logarithms (q.v.) of 30,000 natural numbers to fourteen places of figures, besides the index. His system of logarithms is that now commonly adopted. He next employed himself on a Table of Logarithms of sines and tangents, carried to the hundredth part of a degree, and to fifteen places, which, with a table of natural sines, tangents, and secants, was printed at Gouda, in Holland, in 1631, and published in London in 1633, under the title of Trigonometria Britannica. The Greek epitaph written on him by Henry Jacobs, finishes by saying that his soul still astronomises and his body geometrises.