James Gregory (1638-1675)

The mathematician James Gregory was born at the Manse of Drumoak, Aberdeenshire, in November 1638. He was educated in Aberdeen and then studied at Marischal College in the city. His scientific talent was encouraged by his inventor brother, David Gregory (1627-1720) and at the age of twenty-four he published Optica promota (1663) which was a description of a reflecting telescope which he had invented in 1661. Between 1664 and 1667, Gregory studied mathematics in Padua, Italy, and while there he published Vera circuli et hyperbolae quadratura (1667) in which he showed how to find the areas of the circle, ellipse, and hyperbola.

After his return to Britain, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1668. The same year he published his Exercitationes geometricae. Also in 1668 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at St. Andrews University. In 1672-73 he communicated with Isaac Newton (1642-1727) on the merits or otherwise of their own telescopes.

Towards the end of his life he was also absorbed with the theory of equations. In July 1674 he was elected as the first exclusively Mathematics professor at Edinburgh University, and earlier that year the first Gregorian telescope - the type of instrument that would be used universally throughout the eighteenth century - was presented to the Royal Society in February 1674. He died in October 1675.