John Playfair
Scottish scientist and mathematician
Died when: 71 years 132 days (856 months)Star Sign: Pisces
John Playfair FRSE, FRS (10 March 1748 – 20 July 1819) was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which summarised the work of James Hutton.
It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience.
Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.In 1783 he was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
He served as General Secretary to the society 1798–1819.
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Scottish scientist
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