Whereas MacLaurin worked comfortably in the geometric and algebraic traditions, some of his mathematical contemporaries at Cambridge University developed the algebraic tradition more so than the geometric. A bias toward algebra characterized the lectures and writings of Nicholas Saunderson, who held the Lucasian professorship from 1711 to 1739, and those of his Lucasian successors, John Colson and Edward Waring.

Published posthumously in 1740, Saunderson's Elements of Algebra in Ten Books was the English counterpart of MacLaurin's Treatise of Algebra. Both textbooks evolved from classroom lectures that began as commentaries on Newton's Universal Arithmetick. Both tried to show the reasonableness of, if not demonstrate, some of the algebraic rules that Newton had stated without proof. Both singled out the negative numbers for lengthy explanation while largely accepting Newton's view of imaginary numbers as impossible. Still, there were important differences between the textbooks that spoke to Saunderson's relative detachment from the British geometric tradition. Saunderson not only fostered algebra's independence from geometry, as did MacLaurin, but also boldly declared the superiority of analysis over synthesis. No earlier British algebraist had defended algebraic analysis as strongly and explicitly as he now did in his Elements. He argued that analyis was a method of demonstration; as such, analysis was the equal of synthesis; and, furthermore, the analytic method was actually to be preferred to the synthetic because “a synthetical demonstration only shews that a proposition is true; whereas an analytical one shews not only that a proposition is true, but why it is so.”