MacLaurin, COLIN, mathematician, was born at Kilmodan, Argyllshire, in 1698. He graduated M.A. at Glasgow in 1713, and four years later obtained the professorship of Mathematics in Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1719 he visited London, and was admitted to the Royal Society. Here he published his Geometria Organica (1719), an elaborate treatise on the description of curves.
He afterwards visited France as tutor to Lord Polwarth's son, and while there wrote a dissertation on the percussion of bodies, which gained the prize of the Academy of Sciences in 1724; while sixteen years later he divided with Euler and Bernoulli its prize for an essay on the flux and reflux of the sea. The following year he was appointed, on the recommendation of Newton, assistant to James Gregory, professor of Mathematics in the university of Edinburgh, and soon after succeeded him in the chair. In the labour of preparing trenches and barricades to defend Edinburgh against Prince Charlie's army he took too active a share for his health, and died of dropsy June 14, 1746. MacLaurin's writings gave a strong impetus to the study of mathematical science in Scotland. His Treatise on Fluxions (1742), written in defence of Newton's discoveries against the attack of Berkeley, was the first work in which the principles of fluxions were logically arranged, and formed a contribution of the greatest importance to the theory of the tides and the figure of the earth. The Treatise on Algebra (1748) was left incomplete, as was also the Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1748), containing explanations of all Newton's discoveries, the optical ones excepted. Many papers appeared in the Philosophical Transactions.