John Playfair
(1748-1819)
Scottish minister and scientist
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John Playfair FRSE, FRS (10 March 1748 – 20 July 1819) was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
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| Born |
John Playfair 10 March 1748 Benvie, Forfarshire, Scotland
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| Died |
20 July 1819 (aged 71) Burntisland, Fife, Scotland
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| Zodiac | Pisces |
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