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Wallis, John

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
English mathematician and cleric who made important contributions to the development of algebra and analytical geometry. He was one of the founders of the Royal Society. Wallis was born in Ashford, Kent, and studied at Cambridge. In 1640 he was ordained in the Church of England. He moved to London in 1645 and assisted the Parliamentary side by deciphering captured coded letters during the Civil War. From 1649 he was professor of geometry at Oxford, and in 1658 he was appointed keeper of the university archives. In 1660 Charles II chose him as his royal chaplain. After the revolution of 1688–89, which drove James II from the throne, Wallis was employed by William III as a decipherer. Wallis also conducted experiments in speech and attempted to teach, with some success, congenitally deaf people to speak. His method was described in his Grammatica linguae anglicanae (1652). Wallis's Arithmetica infinitorum (1655) was the most substantial single work on mathematics yet to appear in…
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Full text Article Wallis, John (1616-1703)

From The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Subject : biography, maths and statistics Place : United Kingdom, 'England English mathematician who made important contributions to the development of algebra and analytical geometry and who was one of the founders of the Royal Society. Wallis was born in Ashford, Kent, on 23 October 1616. He began…
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Full text Article Wallis, John (1616–1703).

From The Oxford Companion to British History
Mathematician, grammarian, and founder member of the *Royal Society . A Cambridge graduate, from 1649 he was Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford. During the Civil War he worked on codes for the parliamentary side. In a famous controversy, he showed that Thomas *Hobbes had failed to square the…
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Full text Article Wallis John (1616-1703)

From The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics
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In his own time Omar Khayyám was acknowledged as a brilliant scholar who had mastered mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, law, medicine, and history. To the modern, English-speaking world he is the author of a small volume of remarkably beautiful poetry. Omar Khayyám (meaning “Omar the tentmaker”) …
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John Wallis
English mathematician John Wallis contributed substantially to the origins of the calculus and was the most influential English mathematician before Isaac Newton. By applying algebraic techniques rather than those of traditional geometry, Wallis contributed greatly to solving problems involving…
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Full text Article Wallis, John

From Chambers Biographical Dictionary
1616-1703 English mathematician Born in Ashford, Kent, he graduated at Cambridge, and took holy orders, but in 1649 became Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford. Besides the Arithmetica Infinitorum (1656), in which he offered a remarkable method for finding areas under curves in terms of infinite…
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Full text Article John Wallis, 1825 (engraving)

From Bridgeman Images: Ken Welsh History Collection
John Wallis, 1825 (engraving)
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Full text Article Academy

From The Classical Tradition
The word academy owes its origin to Greek antiquity. It served first as the name of the place where Plato taught his students, on the outskirts of Athens near a grove sacred to a Greek hero known as Academus. The term soon came to signify both an actual place where teaching and learning occurred and…
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Full text Article Wallis, John

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
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Full text Article 23 November 1616

From The Hutchinson Chronology of World History Full text Article 1616
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