BRIGGS, HENRY

born February 1561, Warleywood, Yorkshire, Eng. died Jan. 26, 1630, Oxford, Oxfordshire English mathematician who invented the common, or Briggsian, logarithms. His writings were mainly responsible for the widespread acceptance of logarithms throughout Europe. His innovation was instrumental in easing the burden of mathematicians, astronomers, and other scientists who must make long and tedious calculations. In 1592 Briggs became reader of the Linacre Lecture and in 1596 first professor of geometry at Gresham House (later, College), London. In his lectures at Gresham he proposed that the logarithms of the Scottish mathematician and inventor of logarithms, John Napier, would be more useful if they had a base of 10. In conferences with Napier the alteration proposed by Briggs was agreed upon, and on his return from a second visit to Edinburgh in 1617 he accordingly published the first 1,000 of his logarithms. In 1619 he was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford University. He published a small tract entitled A Treatise of the Northwest Passage to the South Sea, Through the Continent of Virginia and by Fretum Hudson (1622) and Arithmetica Logarithmica (1624), a work containing the logarithms of 30,000 natural numbers to 14 places, in addition to a table of natural trigonometric sine functions to 15 places, and trigonometric tangent and secant functions to 10 places. These tables were printed at Gouda, Neth., in 1631 and published in London in 1633 under the title of Trigonometria Britannica. The latter work remained in general use until the early 19th century.