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Briggs was the man most responsible for scientists' acceptance of logarithms.
He was educated at Cambridge University. In 1592 he became reader of the Linacre lecture and in 1596 became the first professor of geometry at Gresham College, London. In 1619 he was appointed professor of geometry at Oxford.
Briggs published works on navigation, astronomy, and mathematics. In his lectures at Gresham he proposed that Napier's logarithms would be more useful if they were to base 10, so called 'common' logarithms. After travelling to Edinburgh on two occasions to visit Napier, he constructed a table of logarithms (1617) that was used until the 19th century.
In 1619 he was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford.
Briggs' Arithmetica Logarithmica (1624) contained the logarithms of 30000 natural numbers computed to 14 places. In 1631 he published, at Gouda in the Netherlands, tables of sin functions to 15 places and tan and sec functions to 10 places. In 1633 these were also published in London under the title Trigonometrica Britannica .
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