For decades Napier
wrestled with mathematics in the privacy of his home, while his
superstitious neighbours grew convinced he was involved in sorcery and
witchcraft. Dressing in a long, black gown to match his thick, black
beard, he did nothing to dispel their illusions. He achieved one of the
greatest mathematical discoveries of all time while living through one of
the most violent and turbulent periods in Scotland’s history with his home
town of Edinburgh embroiled in civil war and ravaged by the plague.
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For centuries his
reputation remained almost as obscure as the location of his unmarked
grave somewhere in the capital. But his name now lives on at Napier
University in Edinburgh, this year celebrating the 450th anniversary of
his birth in 1550.
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In June 2000 an
honorary degree was conferred on Brigadier General John Hawkins Napier II,
who travelled from his American home to receive the honour bestowed upon
him thanks to his illustrious ancestor.
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Now the university is
setting its sights on education and encouraging the mathematical
inquisitiveness which so characterised the esteemed man from whom it takes
its name, as it prepares to launch John Napier’s Mathematical Challenge
for Schools, to run over the coming months.
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Best known in his
lifetime as author of a Protestant theological work that probed the
prophecies of the Apocalypse to prove the Pope was the Antichrist, Napier
was far from the modern idea of a mathematician - he was a
late-Renaissance man whose powers of lateral thinking took in everything
from agricultural improvement to devising engines of war.
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There was plenty of
conflict brewing when he was born at Merchiston Castle outside Edinburgh,
the son of Sir Archibald Napier, a Scottish judge and wealthy landowner.
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Three years
previously, Napier’s grandfather had been slain while fighting in the army
of Mary Queen of Scots against the English at the Battle of Pinkie. John
Napier would spend most of his life trying not to get involved in the
sectarian strife that swept Scotland. He was not always successful — at 17
he was forced to study abroad, having left St Andrews University
prematurely after his friendship with a Catholic student was thought
inadvisable in such sensitive times.
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Returning to Edinburgh
in 1571, he found the capital plunged into civil war with constant
skirmishes between the forces of Mary attempting a Catholic comeback, and
those of her young son’s Regent, determined to maintain the Protestant
Reformed church.
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Napier returned to
find his father imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle by the Queen’s party, while
the family home at Merchiston was occupied by the forces of the Regent,
then besieging Edinburgh. The following year, when Merchiston was
bombarded by the guns of Edinburgh Castle, Napier sought refuge on one of
the family estates at Gartness in Stirlingshire. There he met and fell in
love with Elizabeth Stirling, daughter of a neighbouring landowner, and,
in 1573, they married.
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He built the family
home on the banks of the River Endrick at Gartness. There, according to
the Statistical Account of Scotland, ‘John Napier of Merchiston, Inventor
of Logarithms, resided a great part of his time when he was making his
calculations.
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It is reported that
the noise of the cascade, being constant, never gave him uneasiness; but
that the clack of the mill, which was only occasional, greatly disturbed
his thoughts. He was therefore, when in deep study, sometimes under the
necessity of desiring the miller to stop the mill, that the train of his
ideas might not be interrupted.’ In this haven of tranquillity, Napier’s
young wife bore him a son and a daughter but their happiness was
short-lived - in 1579, Elizabeth died. A few years Later, Napier
remarried.
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Agnes Chisholm, of
Cromlix, Perthshire. was to bear him five sons and five daughters - a
large and noisy brood for a man who liked to spend long hours in silent
contemplation, a lone, eccentric figure accompanied only by a pet black
cockerel.
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In his head Napier
might be wrestling with theological or mathematical complexities but to
onlookers his behaviour seemed sinister. Rumours spread that he was a
warlock after he enlisted the help of the cockerel to discover which if
his servants had been stealing from him. Each servant was ordered to go
into a darkened room and stroke the cockerel - the bird would crow, said
Napier, when the guilty servant touched it.
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The bird remained
silent but Napier stunned the household by immediately identifying the
culprit. Surely this was sorcery. But all he had done was put soot on the
cockerel's feathers - the innocent servants all had black on their hands,
while the guilty one's were clean because he was afraid to touch the bird.
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At Merchiston, when
pigeons belonging to a neighbouring landowner had been eating Napier's
grain, he threatened to restrain them. 'Do so, if
you can catch them,' scoffed his neighbour. Next morning,
Napier's servants could be seen stuffing hundreds of semi-conscious
pigeons into sacks. Onlookers were convinced Napier had bewitched them -
in fact he had simply scattered succulent peas soaked in wine to get the
birds drunk and incapable.
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He put this gift of
original thought to good use in many fields, including the farmland around
Gartness. He discovered that putting salt on the land would help kill
weeds and fertilise the soil. He worked out the optimum quantities and
published a book, The New Order of Gooding and Manuring all sorts of Field
Land with Common Salt.
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But he could do
nothing to avert the plague that struck Edinburgh in the 1590's, when the
city fathers expelled victims to plague houses which they erected without
permission on Napier's land at Merchiston - he fought a long legal battle
to have them removed.
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To a modern mind, he
also wasted much thought and ingenuity on obscure theology. But in 1593,
when Napier published his "Plan Discovery of the
Whole Revelation of St. John", his book became an international
best-seller in the Protestant world, running to nine editions in Huguenot
France, four in Germany and three in Holland, as well as five in English.
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At a time when
Protestant countries regarded Catholicism as a threat to national
security, any book proving the Pope was the Antichrist was bound to go
down well. Less acceptable was Napier's interest in the occult - he
dabbled in alchemy and witchcraft and passed on his knowledge to his son
Robert, although when King James was burning witches at Edinburgh Castle
it was as well to keep this interest secret.
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Napier's reputation as
a sorcerer led him into dubious association with the thuggish Robert Logan
of Restalrig, who had been involved in the Gowrie Conspiracy to abduct the
King and imprison him at Fastcastle, Logan's private fortress on the East
Coast, where his family were in the habit of committing robbery with
violence on any passer-by. For this Logan had been declared an outlaw, yet
inexplicably Napier agreed to help him search for buried treasure at
Fastcastle. Luckily none were ever found, since Logan would rather have
committed murder than hand over Napier's share.
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But while dabbling in
the occult was a private folly, Scotland's religious differences were a
public grief for Napier. Since 1588, when the Spanish Armada threatened
Protestant Scotland, he had been a commissioner of the Church of Scotland.
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After the Armada was
wrecked, Scottish Catholic nobles continued to intrigue with the King of
Spain. Among them was Napier's father-in-law, Sir James Chisholm. In 1593,
Napier had the unpleasant task of sitting on the Kirk convention that Sir
James excommunicated.
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Yet Napier was a
staunch supporter of the Protestant cause and, when Catholic Spain
threatened another invasion in 1596, he turned his powers on invention to
weapons of war.
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In his
"Secrete Inventionis" he published
details of a giant mirror to burn enemy ships by focusing the sun's rays
on them, a man-powered tank, a submarine, and a form of artillery which
could clear a field of anything standing over a foot high. In the event
none of these were needed.
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Napier pressed on with
invention and theology and in fact it was not until the age of 64 that he
published his greatest discovery - logarithms - with the boast:
"This new course of Logarithms doth clean take
away all the difficulty that heretofore hath been in mathematical
calculations."
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The impact of Napier's
work was enormous. While explorers voyaged across the globe, they could
not navigate accurately or map their discoveries because the calculations
were too complicated to perform rapidly on board a ship. When a captain
had a copy of Napier's log tables, all this changed.
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Without an advance in
mathematics to underpin the growth of science in understanding the
universe, it had been impossible to chart the orbit of the planets around
the sun - the necessary calculations were so complex that it would take
decades to achieve. Napier's logarithms, for which he had devised the
decimal point as a way of expressing complex fractions, enabled a
breakthrough.
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Johannes Kepler, who
in 1609 first published his work on the laws of planetary motion, had
taken four years to calculate the orbit of Mars alone.
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It might have taken
him longer than a lifetime to work out the rest, had he not obtained
Napier's logarithms.
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In 1619 he wrote to
Napier to acknowledge his great debt - only to find the hitherto unknown
Scottish mathematical genius had died two years previously.
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But before his death
Napier had left full details of how his logarithms had been calculated,
and had left one final invention as a boon to the merchant classes.
Napier's Rods, or Napier's Bones as they were called from the material
they were made of, were in effect a powerful pocket calculator.
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Each set of 11 rods,
marked off in numbered squares, could be assembled in different ways to
multiply or divide large numbers by reading down and across the columns of
figures created.
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But in such success
lay his ultimate downfall.
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In his calculations
and methodologies he made possible the very modern technology which was to
supersede him and render him until now, Scotland's greatest and most
forgotten man.
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