Sacrobosco

Sacrobosco, JOANNES DE (or JOHN HOLYWOOD), an English mathematician of whom little is known, except that he seems to have been a native of Halifax, to have studied at Oxford, and taught at Paris as professor of Mathematics, where he died in 1244 or 1250. He was one of the first doctors of the middle ages who made use of the astronomical writings of the Arabians. His treatise, De Sphæra Mundi, a paraphrase of a portion of Ptolemy's Almagest, enjoyed great renown as a manual among the scholastics. First published in 1472, it passed by 1647 through forty editions, besides translations and commentaries. See an article by C. L. Kingsford in vol. xxvii. of the Dict. Nat. Biog. (1891).