Everything about John Greaves totally explained
John Greaves (
1602 -
October 8,
1652),
English mathematician and
antiquary, the eldest son of John Greaves, rector of Colemore, was born near Alresford in
Hampshire.
He was educated at
Balliol College, Oxford, 1617 – 1621, and in
1630 was chosen professor of
geometry in
Gresham College, London. After travelling in Europe, he visited the East in 1637, where he collected a considerable number of
Arabic,
Persian and
Greek manuscripts, and made a more accurate survey of the
pyramids of Egypt than any traveller who had preceded him.
On his return to Europe he visited for a second time several parts of
Italy, and during his stay at
Rome instituted inquiries into the ancient
weights and measures that are among the early classics of
metrology. In
1643 he was appointed to the
Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford, but he was deprived of his Gresham professorship for having neglected its duties. In
1645 he essayed a reformation of the
calendar, but his plan wasn't adopted. In 1648 he lost both his fellowship and his Savilian chair on account of his adherence to the royalist party. But his private fortune more than sufficed for all his wants till his death; he retired to London, married and occupied his leisure writing and editing books and manuscripts.
Besides his papers in the
Philosophical Transactions, the principal works of Greaves are:
- Pyramidographia, or a Description of the Pyramids in Ægypt (1646)
- A Discourse on the Roman Foot and Denarius (1649)
- Elementa Linguae Persicae (1649)
- (with Samuel Foster) Lemmata Archimedis, apud Graecos et Latinos iam pridem desiderata, e vetusto codice manuscripto Arabico... (1659)
His miscellaneous works were published in 1737 by Dr Thomas Birch, with a biographical notice of the author. See also Smith's Vita quorundam erudit. virorum and John Ward's Gresham Professors.
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