John Playfair FRSE, FRS was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
John Playfair
Sir John Playfair by Sir Francis Chantrey
Memorial to John Playfair, Old Calton Burial Ground, Edinburgh
Monument to John Playfair on Calton Hill, Edinburgh
James Hutton was a Scottish geologist, agriculturalist, chemical manufacturer, naturalist and physician. Often referred to as the "Father of Modern Geology," he played a key role in establishing geology as a modern science.
Portrait by Henry Raeburn, 1776
Hutton's Unconformity on Arran
John Kay's caricature of James Hutton studying the "faces" of rock (1787)
Street sign in the Kings Buildings complex in Edinburgh to the memory of James Hutton