 Glenora Single Malt Whisky  Scottish Review  Click here to get
a Printer Friendly Page  Significant Scots John Napier By Jeremy
Hodges in the Daily Mail, July 8, 2000  He was ‘the person to
whom the title of great man is more justly due than to any other
whom this country has produced’. In this simple pronouncement,
the Scottish intellectual David Flume summed up his fellow
countryman John Napier.  Yet most Scots know little or nothing
about the 16th-century mathematician, philosopher and inventor
who, from his secluded tower in Scotland, produced the vital
tool needed by mankind to explore the globe and fathom the
universe. Without Napier's invention of logarithms and the
decimal notation for complex fractions, the discoveries of
others such as Galileo, Kepler and Newton would have been
hindered by years of long and complex calculations.  For decades
Napier wrestled with mathematics in the privacy of his home,
while his superstitious neighbours grew convinced he was
involved in sorcery and witchcraft. Dress