Early Scottish relations with the Royal Society I.- James Gregory, F. R. S. (1635-1675)

James Gregory (or Gregorie as his name was usually I spelt in the seventeenth century), astronomer and geometer, was born in November 1638 at the Manse of Drumoak, on Deeside, near Aberdeen: he died in October 1675 at Edinburgh, of a sudden illness and at the height of his intellectual powers. Among his contemporaries he was held to be second only to Newton, who was four years his junior. Both Gregory and his wife Mary Jamesone, who was his second cousin, came of a family remarkable for extraordinary talent which persisted throughout two centuries and seven generations. James was a grandchild of David Anderson of Aberdeen, a man of considerable sagacity in mechanics, who earned the name ‘ Davie/do/a’/thing,’ whether for constructing a church spire and raising the great bells into position, or for removing a dangerous rock from the harbour mouth by harnessing it to the tide. His brother Alexander was the leading Scottish mathematician at the beginning of the century who had edited and expounded the trigonometry of Vieta, the father of symbolic algebra. Janet, the daughter of David, married the Reverend John Gregory, a descendant of the Highland clan Macgregor of Roro, the younger branch of the Glenlyon family. Something of their wild fighting spirit was inherited by each of their academic descendants. Mary was the daughter of George Jamesone, a distinguished portrait painter, who was a nephew of David and Alexander

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• The Copernican System in Great Britain

  John L Russell•Reception of Copernicus'…•1973

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