Abstract
CHARLES HUTTON, when engaged in editing the “Diarian Miscellany” in 1775, regretted the insufficiency of biographical material for the lives of the mathematicians responsible for the problems that appeared every year in the eighteenth century almanacks known as the “Gentleman's” and “Ladies’” “Diaries”, which were edited by Henry Beighton of Griff from 1714 until 1744, with the assistance of Anthony Thacker, and later by Robert Heath, 1745–53. One of their collaborators was John Thompson of Witherley Bridge in Leicestershire, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of whose death falls on February 25. By good fortune his surveying instruments, until recently in the possession of his descendant, Mrs. Alkin of Atherstone, are still extant and have been presented by the Friends of the Old Ashmolean to the Lewis Evans Collection at Oxford. They show that Thompson was a practical inventor and improver of instruments as well as a mathematician. It is stated in Nichol's “History of Leicestershire” that Thompson, on leaving Atherstone School, had been intended by his father for the farming and grazing business, but the boy's innate love of mathematics was so strong that, with the collusion of his mother, he surreptitiously purchased a few mathematical books and studied them where and when he could, generally at night. He was helped by Beighton and Thacker, and contributed articles to various journals. When Atherstone common fields were enclosed in 1765, an error by the Commissioners led him to propose a prize question (No. 290) in the “Gentleman's Diary” for 1766. It had been agreed that the small cottages should have a plot known as Cottagers’ Piece in the shape of two trapezia to contain 100 acres. Thompson was asked to resurvey it and found it three acres too large, on which he based his prize question, as he said, “that the error of these unmathematical Bunglers may be known”.
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John Thompson. Nature 131, 232–233 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131232b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131232b0