Recorde

Recorde, ROBERT, mathematician, was born about 1500 at Tenby, in Pembrokeshire, Wales. He completed his education at Oxford, but, wishing to make medicine his profession, removed to Cambridge, where in 1545 he received the degree of M.D. In 1547 he was in London, engaged in the composition of The Urinal of Physic (1548), and was about the same time appointed physician to Edward VI., as afterwards to Queen Mary. Ten years later we find him in the debtors' prison in London, where he died miserably in 1558. His works are all in the form of dialogues between a master and his pupil, and are written in the rude English of his time; they are The Grounde of Artes, teaching the Perfect Work and Practice of Arithmetick (1543); The Pathwaye to Knowledge (1551), an abridgment of Euclid's Elements; The Castle of Knowledge, containing the Explanation of the Sphere both Celestial and Material, (1551), an astronomical work, in which he compares the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems; The Whetstone of Wit (1557), a treatise upon algebra. In the appreciation of the general results derivable from algebraic formulæ he is far beyond his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Vieta (q.v.).