Landen

John Landen

Born: 23 Jan 1719 in Peakirk (near Peterborough), England
Died: 15 Jan 1790 in Milton (near Peterborough), England

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A trained surveyor, Landen's interest in mathematics was his leisure activity. He wrote on dynamics, summation of series and an important transformation giving a relation between elliptic functions.

He investigated the dilogarithm in 1760, about the same time as Euler, and introduced the trilogarithm. The trilogarithm was studied further by Spence around 1809 and Kummer around 1840.

Landen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1766.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. C Hutton, John Landen, A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary II (London, 1795), 7-9.
  3. G N Watson, The Marquis and the Land-Agent, Mathematical Gazette 17 (1933).
  4. G Almkvist, Gauss, Landen, Ramanujan, the arithmetic-geometric mean, ellipses, pi and the Ladies Diary, Amer. Math. Monthly 95 (1988), 585-608. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996