Talk:John Napier

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 January 2019 and 10 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Rt3z7, Mghgd. Peer reviewers: ThisIsForHistory, Charles Cooley.

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Hyperbole

I think "undoubtedly one of the most important inventions in math" and "in line with Archimedes, Newton, Einstein" is slightly exaggerated. Logarithms are an important contribution, no doubt. Maybe we could reduce the hyperbole though. --AxelBoldt

I think he also wrote some religious treatises. Extreme Calvinist stuff i think. Don't how how important that was considered at the time.

I thought that the decimal point was first invented by Simon Stevin. See http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Stevin.html for example. -- Dominus 15:05, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The Simon Stevin page says he didn't, but it credits Bartholomaeus Pitiscus with the invention of the decimal point. -- Dominus 15:07, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Nearly every major mathmatical discovery has been "discovered" at least twice. He may well have "discovered" it.

--Gunter 03:58, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC) Didn't Joost Buerghi (Switzerland) developed the Logarithm table in 1588? This preceeds Napier.

In-line reference

I removed a pseudo-reference found in-line with the text. First it did not follow the Harvard Reference format. Second it barely had enough information to find the article, but I had to use a Google search, which should never be necessary with a Wikipedia reference. A properly formatted reference contains all the information a reader needs to find the reference directly. Third it contained an error: the year given was 2006, and the year I found was 2010. Please do not put this type of quasi-reference in-line with the text. It violates all editing norms. Thanks. Nick Beeson (talk) 16:06, 10 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Decimal Point Contradiction

This article states, in section Advances in mathematics, "Napier made further contributions. He improved Simon Stevin's decimal notation, introducing the period (.) a the delimiter for the fractional part." (grammar sic)

However, this statement contradicts article Simon_Stevin#Decimal_fractions, which states, "The point separating the integers from the decimal fractions seems to be the invention of Bartholomaeus Pitiscus, in whose trigonometrical tables (1612) it occurs and it was accepted by John Napier in his logarithmic papers (1614 and 1619)." David Spector (talk) 19:22, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]