37 Facts About John Wallis

Between 1643 and 1689 Wallis served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court.

John Wallis was a contemporary of Newton and one of the greatest intellectuals of the early renaissance of mathematics.

John Wallis was the third of five children of Revd.

John Wallis was initially educated at a school in Ashford but moved to James Movat's school in Tenterden in 1625 following an outbreak of plague.

John Wallis was first exposed to mathematics in 1631, at Felsted School ; he enjoyed maths, but his study was erratic, since "mathematics, at that time with us, were scarce looked on as academical studies, but rather mechanical".

At the school in Felsted, John Wallis learned how to speak and write Latin.

John Wallis received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1637 and a Master's in 1640, afterwards entering the priesthood.

John Wallis was elected to a fellowship at Queens' College, Cambridge in 1644, from which he had to resign following his marriage.

John Wallis rendered them great practical assistance in deciphering Royalist dispatches.

John Wallis was concerned about the use of ciphers by foreign powers, refusing, for example, Gottfried Leibniz's request of 1697 to teach Hanoverian students about cryptography.

John Wallis was finally able to indulge his mathematical interests, mastering William Oughtred's Clavis Mathematicae in a few weeks in 1647.

John Wallis soon began to write his own treatises, dealing with a wide range of topics, which he continued for the rest of his life.

John Wallis wrote the first survey about mathematical concepts in England where he discussed the Hindu-Arabic system.

John Wallis joined the moderate Presbyterians in signing the remonstrance against the execution of Charles I, by which he incurred the lasting hostility of the Independents.

John Wallis later claimed credit for this, leading Holder to accuse John Wallis of "rifling his Neighbours, and adorning himself with their spoyls".

In 1649 John Wallis was appointed as Savilian Professor of Geometry.

John Wallis seems to have been chosen largely on political grounds ; while John Wallis was perhaps the nation's leading cryptographer and was part of an informal group of scientists that would later become the Royal Society, he had no particular reputation as a mathematician.

Nonetheless, John Wallis' appointment proved richly justified by his subsequent work during the 54 years he served as Savilian Professor.

John Wallis made significant contributions to trigonometry, calculus, geometry, and the analysis of infinite series.

In 1655, John Wallis published a treatise on conic sections in which they were defined analytically.

Arithmetica Infinitorum, the most important of John Wallis's works, was published in 1656.

John Wallis began, after a short tract on conic sections, by developing the standard notation for powers, extending them from positive integers to rational numbers:.

John Wallis illustrated this by the parabola, in which case m = 2.

The solutions given by Neile and John Wallis are somewhat similar to that given by van Heuraet, though no general rule is enunciated, and the analysis is clumsy.

In 1685 John Wallis published Algebra, preceded by a historical account of the development of the subject, which contains a great deal of valuable information.

John Wallis was not alone in this thinking: Leonhard Euler came to the same conclusion by considering the geometric series, evaluated at, followed by reasoning similar to John Wallis's.

John Wallis is usually credited with the proof of the Pythagorean theorem using similar triangles.

John Wallis was inspired by the works of Islamic mathematician Sadr al-Tusi, the son of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, particularly by al-Tusi's book written in 1298 on the parallel postulate.

John Wallis found that Euclid's fifth postulate is equivalent to the one currently named "Wallis postulate" after him.

John Wallis slept badly and often did mental calculations as he lay awake in his bed.

John Wallis translated into Latin works of Ptolemy and Bryennius, and Porphyrius's commentary on Ptolemy.

John Wallis published three letters to Henry Oldenburg concerning tuning.

John Wallis approved of equal temperament, which was being used in England's organs.

John Wallis was a moderate supporter of the Parliamentarian side in the First English Civil War and therefore worked as a decipherer of intercepted correspondence for the Parliamentarian leaders.

John Wallis was quite open about it and Wallis was rewarded for his role.

John Wallis lobbied enthusiastically, both on his own behalf, and that of his relatives, as witnessed by letters to Lord Nottingham, Richard Hampden and the MP Harbord Harbord that Smith quotes.

John Wallis' development of a model of English grammar, independent of earlier models based on Latin grammar, is a case in point of the way other sciences helped develop cryptology in his view.