Gunter

Edmund Gunter

Born: 1581 in Hertfordshire, England
Died: 10 Dec 1626 in London, England

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Gunter was professor of astronomy at Gresham College London from 1619 until his death. A colleague and friend of Briggs, he published seven figure tables of logarithms of sines and tangents in 1620 in Canon Triangulorum, or Table of Artificial Sines and Tangents . The words cosine and cotangent are due to him.

He made a mechanical device, Gunter's scale, to multiply numbers based on the logs using a single scale and a pair of dividers. It was called the gunter by seamen and was an important step in the development of the slide rule. He also invented Gunter's chain which was 22 yards long with 100 links. It was used for surveying and the unit of area called an acre is one square chain.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about trigonometric notation

Other Web sites:

Rice University, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. J V Pepper, Harriot's Unpublished Papers, History of Science 6 (1968), 17-40.
  4. B E Babcock, Some notes on the history and use of Gunter's scale, Journal of the Oughtred Society 3 (1994), 14-20. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996