Brook Taylor | |
|---|---|
 Engraving of Taylor c. 1720s | |
| Born | Brook Taylor 18 August 1685 |
| Died | 29 December 1731(1731-12-29) (aged 46) London, England |
| Resting place | St Ann's, Soho |
| Citizenship | English |
| Alma mater | St John's College, Cambridge |
| Known for | Taylor's theorem Taylor series Finite difference Integration by parts |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | St John's College, Cambridge |
| Academic advisors | John Machin andJohn Keill |
Brook TaylorFRS (18 August 1685 – 29 December 1731) was an English mathematician and barrister best known for several results inmathematical analysis. Taylor's most famous developments areTaylor's theorem and theTaylor series, essential in the infinitesimal approach of functions in specific points.
Brook Taylor was born inEdmonton (formerMiddlesex). Taylor was the son of John Taylor, MP ofPatrixbourne, Kent[1] and Olivia Tempest, the daughter ofSir Nicholas Tempest, Baronet of Durham.[2]
He enteredSt John's College, Cambridge, as afellow-commoner in 1701, and took degrees inLL.B. in 1709 andLL.D. in 1714.[3] Taylor studiedmathematics underJohn Machin andJohn Keill, leading to Taylor obtaining a solution to the problem of "center of oscillation". Taylor's solution remained unpublished until May 1714,[4] when his claim topriority was disputed byJohann Bernoulli.
Taylor'sMethodus Incrementorum Directa et Inversa (1715) ("Direct and Indirect Methods of Incrementation") added a new branch to higher mathematics, called "calculus offinite differences". Taylor used this development to determine the form of movement in vibrating strings. Taylor also wrote the first satisfactory investigation ofastronomical refraction.[5][6] The same work contains the well-knownTaylor's theorem, the importance of which remained unrecognized until 1772, whenJoseph-Louis Lagrange realized its usefulness and termed it "the main foundation of differential calculus".[7][8]
In Taylor's 1715 essayLinear Perspective, Taylor set forth the principles of perspective in a more understandable form, but the work suffered from brevity and obscurity problems which plagued most of his writings, meaning the essay required further explanation in the treatises ofJoshua Kirby (1754) and Daniel Fournier (1761).[8][9]
Taylor was elected as a fellow in theRoyal Society in 1712. In the same year, Taylor sat on the committee for adjudicating the claims of SirIsaac Newton andGottfried Leibniz. He acted as secretary to the society from 13 January 1714 to 21 October 1718.
From 1715 onward, Taylor's studies took a philosophical and religious bent. He corresponded with theComte de Montmort on the subject ofNicolas Malebranche's tenets. Unfinished treatises written on his return fromAix-la-Chapelle in 1719,On the Jewish Sacrifices andOn the Lawfulness of Eating Blood, were afterwards found among his papers.[8]
Taylor was one of few English mathematicians, along with Isaac Newton andRoger Cotes, who was capable of holding his own with theBernoullis, but a lack of clarity affected a great part of his demonstrations and Taylor lost brevity through his failure to express his ideas fully and clearly.[8]
His health began to fail in 1717 after years of intense work.[10]
Taylor married Miss Brydges ofWallington, Surrey in 1721 without his father's approval. The marriage led to an estrangement with his father, which improved in 1723 after Taylor's wife died in childbirth while giving birth to a son. Taylor's son did not survive.
He spent the next two years with his family at Bifrons, and in 1725 he married with his father's approval, Sabetta Sawbridge ofOlantigh,Kent. She died in childbirth in 1730, though his only[11] daughter, Elizabeth, survived.
Taylor's father died in 1729, leaving Taylor to inherit the Bifrons estate.
Taylor died at the age of 46, on 29 December 1731, atSomerset House, London.
Taylor's grandson, Sir William Young, printed aposthumous work entitledContemplatio Philosophica for private circulation in 1793, (2nd Bart., 10 January 1815). The work was prefaced by a biography,[10] and had an appendix containing letters addressed to him byBolingbroke,Bossuet, and others.
Several short papers by Taylor were published inPhil. Trans., vols. xxvii to xxxii, which including accounts of experiments inmagnetism andcapillary attraction. In 1719, Brook issued an improved version of his work on perspective,New Principles of Linear Perspective, which was revised byJohn Colson in 1749. A French translation was published in 1757.[12] It was reprinted, with a portrait and short biography, in 1811.
Taylor is animpact crater located on theMoon, named in honor of Brook Taylor in 1935.[13]
Media related toBrook Taylor at Wikimedia Commons
