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Henry Briggs: The Trigonometria Britannica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2016

Ian Bruce
Ian Bruce*
Affiliation:
Dept of Physics & Mathematical Physics, University of Adelaide, S. Australia. P.C.5005, ibruce@physics.adelaide.edu.au
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Extract

In 1632, Henry Gellibrand, then the Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, arranged for the publishing of the Trigonometria Britannica (T. B.) by Adrian Vlacq in Gouda the following year: the work consisted of two Books, and sets of tables of natural sines in steps of one hundredth of a degree to 15 places, as well as tables of tangents & secants to 10 places, together with their logarithms. The explanatory Book I was the last work of Henry Briggs (1559-1631), Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, and was devoted mainly to the construction of his table of sines; while Book II, written by the youthful Gellibrand on the instigation of the dying Briggs, his mentor, contained instructions and examples on the use of logarithms in solving trigonometrical problems.

Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 88 , Issue 513 , November 2004 , pp. 457 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 2004

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References

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