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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: BAR-BEC |
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BARROW, ISAAC (1630-1677) , English mathematician and divine, was the son of Thomas Barrow, a linen- draper
establishment
great
consul
ambassador , and Sir Jonathan Dawes, with whom he afterwards contracted an intimate friendship. While at Constantinople he read and studied the works of St Chrysostom, whom he preferred to all the other Fathers. He resided in Turkey somewhat more than a year, after which he proceeded to Venice, and thence returned home through Germany and Holland in 1659.Immediately on his reaching England he received ordination from Bishop Brownrig, and in 166o he was appointed to the Greek professorship at Cambridge . When he entered upon this office he intended to have prelected upon the tragedies of Sophocles; but he altered his intention and made choice of Aristotle's rhetoric. His lectures on this subject, having been lent to a friend who never returned them, are irrecoverably lost. In July 1662 he was elected professor of geometry in Gresham College, on the recommendation of Dr John Wilkins, master of Trinity College and afterwards bishop of Chester; and in May 1663 he was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society, at the first election made by the council after obtaining their charter. The same year the ;executors of Henry
Cambridge , fixed upon Barrow as the first professor; and although his two professorships were not inconsistent with each other, he chose to resign that of Gresham College, which he did on the 20th of May 1664. In 1669 he resigned his mathematical chair to his pupil, Isaac Newton, having now determined to renounce the study of mathematics for that of divinity. Upon quitting his professorship Barrow was only a fellow of Trinity College; but his uncle gave him a small sinecure in Wales, and Dr Seth Ward, bishop of Salisbury, conferred upon him a prebend in that church. In the year 167o he was created doctor
By his English contemporaries Barrow was considered a mathematician second only to Newton. Continental writers do not place him so high, and their judgment is probably the more correct one. He was undoubtedly a clear-sighted and able mathematician, who handled admirably the severe geometrical method, and who in his Method of Tangents approximated to the course of reasoning by which Newton was afterwards led to the doctrine of ultimate ratios; but his substantial contributions to the science are of no great
His scientific works are very numerous. The most important are:Euclid's Elements; Euclid's Data; Optical Lectures, read in the public school of Cambridge; Thirteen Geometrical Lectures; The Works of Archimedes, the Four Books of Apollonius's Conic Sections, and Theodosius's Spherics, explained in a New Method ; A Lecture, in which Archimedes' Theorems of the Sphere and Cylinder are investigated and briefly demonstrated ; Mathematical Lectures, read in the public schools of the university of Cambridge. The above were all written in Latin. His English works have been collected and published in four volumes folio. See Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, and Whewell's biography prefixed to the 9th volume of Napier's edition of Barrow's -Sermons. End of Article: BARROW, ISAAC (1630-1677) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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