William Oughtred, (born March 5, 1574, Eton, Buckinghamshire, England—died June 30, 1660, Albury, Surrey), English mathematician and Anglican minister who invented the earliest type of the slide rule, two similar linear or round logarithmic scales held collectively and adjusted by hand. Improvements involving the acquainted internal sliding rule got here later.
Oughtred was educated at Eton College and at King’s College, Cambridge, the place he acquired his bachelor’s diploma (1596) and grasp’s diploma (1600). Before his ordainment as an Anglican priest in 1603 and appointment as vicar of Shalford in 1604, Oughtred had already designed (or improved upon) a number of devices and composed numerous works that may be revealed a lot later. In 1610 he turned rector of Albury, the place he remained till his dying.
Oughtred was extraordinarily beneficiant in helping anybody desirous of instruction in arithmetic, refusing to simply accept any remuneration for such instruction. For greater than 5 a long time he tutored among the better-known English mathematicians, similar to John Wallis, John Pell, and Seth Ward, in addition to quite a few lecturers of arithmetic and instrument-makers who practiced in London. In addition, he saved abreast of the mathematical sciences on the Continent, and both by means of correspondence or by phrase of mouth he assisted within the diffusion of French and Italian outcomes amongst English practitioners.
As a priest, Oughtred was reluctant to publish on arithmetic. However, in 1631 he consented to permit the printing of a small guide that he had utilized in educating considered one of his college students. The e-book turned well-known below the title of Clavis Mathematicae (“The Key to Mathematics”), though it was not a simple textual content. It compressed a lot of latest European data of arithmetic and algebra into lower than 100 pages (within the first version), whereas a considerably obscure model and a penchant for extreme symbolism made the dense textual content much more difficult. Of the various symbols Oughtred launched solely two are nonetheless extensively used, “×” for multiplication and “::” for proportion. Despite its issue, the e-book rapidly turned probably the most widespread arithmetic textbooks in Seventeenth-century England. It was usually reprinted each in Latin and within the vernacular, and it exerted a formative affect on, amongst others, the chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91), the architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and the mathematician-physicist Isaac Newton (1643–1727). Oughtred’s different writings have been revealed by his college students a lot later, together with Trigonometria (1657; “Trigonometry”) and a posthumous assortment of tracts, Opuscula mathematica hactenus inedita (1677; “Unpublished Mathematical Papers”).
Shortly after the publication of the Clavis Mathematicae, Oughtred turned embroiled in a bitter precedence dispute over instrument design. In the early 1620s, bettering upon a logarithmic scale invented by Edmund Gunter, Oughtred designed the round slide rule. However, in 1630 a former scholar of his and tutor to King Charles I of Great Britain, Richard Delamain, revealed a small pamphlet by which he claimed to have invented that instrument, and an acrimonious controversy ensued. Oughtred described his round slide rule in Circles of Proportion and the Horizontal Instrument (1632), which, along with defending his popularity and precedence through the controversy, addressed the necessary concern of the right position of idea and devices within the educating of arithmetic—a topic of continuous debate.