John Napier
Videos
John Napier of Merchiston, nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston. Napier is best known as the
1616 portrait of Napier
Merchiston Castle from an 1834 woodcut
Memorial to John Napier in St Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh
Cover of Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (1614)
Napier's bones
Videos
Napier's bones is a manually operated calculating device created by John Napier of Merchiston, Scotland for the calculation of products and quotients of numbers. The method was based on lattice multip
John Napier
…mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston. Napier is best known as the discoverer of logarithms. He also invented the Napier's bones calculating device and popularised the use of the decimal point in arithmetic. Napier's birthplace, Merchiston Tower in Edinburgh, is now part of the…
A set of Napier's bones
An unusual 18th-century set of Napier's bones in which the numbers are on rotating cylinders rather than rods of square cross-section