Reuben Burrow was an English mathematician, surveyor and orientalist. Initially a teacher, he was appointed assistant to Sir Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal, at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and was involved in the Schiehallion experiment. He later conducted research in India, teaching himself Sanskrit and becoming one of the first members of the Asiatic Society. He was the first to measure the length of a degree of an arc of longitude along the Tropic of Cancer. His other major achievements included a study of Indian mathematics, although he earned a reputation for being rude and unpolished amid the leading figures in science who came mostly from the upper-class. One commentator called him "an able mathematician but a most vulgar and scurrilous dog."

The Schiehallion experiment was an 18th-century experiment to determine the mean density of the Earth. Funded by a grant from the Royal Society, it was conducted in the summer of 1774 around the Scottish mountain of Schiehallion, Perthshire. The experiment involved measuring the tiny deflection of the vertical due to the gravitational attraction of a nearby mountain. Schiehallion was considered the ideal location after a search for candidate mountains, thanks to its isolation and almost symmetrical shape.