“In the year 1649 I removed to Oxford, being then Publick Professor of Geometry, of the Foundation of Sr. Henry Savile. And Mathematicks which had before been a pleasing diversion, was now to be my serious Study.”
Our latest Oxford Mathematician is John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry from 1649 to 1703, and the most influential English mathematician before the rise of Isaac Newton. His most important works were his Arithmetic of Infinitesimals and his treatise on Conic Sections, both published in the 1650s. These were full of fresh discoveries and insights and appeared at a critical time in the development of mathematics. It was through studying the former that Newton came to discover his version of the binomial theorem. Wallis’s last great mathematical work, A Treatise of Algebra, was published in his seventieth year.
See also the first in the series on G H Hardy