Henry Briggs

Contribution-In1616 Briggs visited Napier at Edinburgh in order to discuss the suggested change to
Napier's logarithms. The following year he again visited for a similar purpose. During these conferences
the alteration proposed by Briggs was agreed upon; and on his return from his second visit to Edinburgh,
in 1617, he published the first chiliad of his logarithms. In 1619 he was appointed Savilian
professor of geometry at Oxford, and resigned his professorship of Gresham College in July 1620. Soon
after his settlement at Oxford he was incorporated master of arts. In 1622 he published a small tract on
the Northwest Passage to the South Seas, through the Continent of Virginia andHudson Bay. The tract is
notorious today as the origin of the cartographic myth of California as an Island. In it Briggs stated he had
seen a map that had been brought from Holland that showed California Island. Briggs' tract was
republished three years later (1625) in Pvrchas His Pilgrimes (vol 3, p848). In 1624 his Arithmetica
Logarithmica, in folio, a work containing the logarithms of thirty thousand natural numbers to fourteen
decimal places (1-20,000 and 90,001 to 100,000). This table was later extended by Adriaan Vlacq, but to
10 places, and byAlexander John Thompson to 20 places in 1952. Briggs was one of the first to
use finite-difference methods to compute tables of functions. He also completed a table of logarithmic
sines and tangents for the hundredth part of every degree to fourteen decimal places, with a table
of natural sines to fifteen places, and the tangents and secants for the same to ten places; all of which
were printed at Gouda in 1631 and published in 1633 under the title of Trigonometria Britannica; this work
was probably a successor to his 1617 Logarithmorum Chilias Prima ("The First Thousand Logarithms"),
which gave a brief account of logarithms and a long table of the first 1000 integers calculated to the 14th
decimal place.
Life-Briggs was born at Warleywood, near Halifax, in Yorkshire, England. After
studying Latin and Greek at a local grammar school, he entered St John's College, Cambridge,
in 1577, and graduated in 1581.[4] In 1588, he was elected a Fellow of St John's. In 1592 he was
made reader of the physical lecture founded by Thomas Linacre; he would also read some of
the mathematical lectures as well. During this period, he took an interest in navigation and
astronomy, collaborating with Edward Wright. In 1596, he became first professor of Geometry in
the recently-founded Gresham College, London; where he taught geometry, astronomy and
navigation. He lectured there for nearly 23 years, and made Gresham College a centre of
English mathematics, from which he would notably support the new ideas of Johannes Kepler.
He was a friend of Christopher Heydon, the writer on astrology, though Briggs himself
rejected astrology for religious reasons.[5] He once called astrology, “a mere system of
groundless conceits. At this time, Briggs obtained a copy of Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis
Descriptio, in which Napier introduced the idea of logarithms. It has also been suggested that he
knew of the method outlined in Fundamentum Astronomiae published by the Swiss
clockmaker Jost Bürgi, through John Dee.[7] Napier's formulation was awkward to work with, but
the book fired Briggs' imagination – in his lectures at Gresham College he proposed the idea of
base 10 logarithms in which the logarithm of 10 would be 1; and soon afterwards he wrote to the
inventor on the subject. Briggs was active in many areas, and his advice in astronomy,
surveying, navigation, and other activities like mining was frequently sought. Briggs in 1619
invested in the London Company, and he had two sons: Henry, who later emigrated to Virginia,
and Thomas, who remained in England.[8] The lunar crater Briggs is named in his honour

Works-Henry Briggs (1561-1630) was a geometer and an active applied mathematician. He

was the first Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, and later became the first
Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford University, appointed by Henry Savile (1549-1622)
himself. Briggs was impressed by John Napier’s (1550-1617) invention of logarithms and their
facility in easing calculations. However, he considered their basis to be somewhat awkward and
conceived his own system of logarithms with a base of 10. Briggs published his first extensive
table of these logarithms in 1624 in Arithmetica Logarithmica. His table contained the logarithms
of 30,000 natural numbers, each carried out to fourteen decimal places. Today, we refer to
Briggs’ logarithms as “common logarithms.” In Chapter 26 of his Arithmetica, Briggs
demonstrated the use of his logarithms in computing the properties of the ellipse. In Chapter 28,
Briggs used logarithms to solve more complex geometric problems involving inscribed polygons.

The Special Collections staff at the Linderman Library of Lehigh University in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, is pleased to cooperate with the Mathematical Association of America to exhibit
this and other items from the Library’s holdings in “Mathematical Treasures.” In particular,
Convergence would like to thank Lois Fischer Black, Curator, Special Collections, and
Ilhan Citak, Archives and Special Collections Librarian, for their kind assistance in helping to
make this display possible. You may use these images in your classroom; all other uses require
permission from the Special Collections staff, Linderman Library, Lehigh University. Swetz,
Frank J., "Mathematical Treasure: Arithmetica Logarithmica of Henry Briggs.