Richard Swineshead

Who is Richard Swineshead?

Richard Swineshead was an English mathematician, logician, and natural philosopher. He was perhaps the greatest of the Oxford Calculators of Merton College, where he was a fellow certainly by 1344 and possibly by 1340. His magnum opus was a series of treatises known as the Liber calculationum, written c. 1350, which earned him the nickname of The Calculator.

Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy that "Scaliger and Cardan admire Suisset the calculator, qui pene modum excessit humani ingenii [whose talents were almost superhuman]". Gottfried Leibniz wrote in a letter of 1714: "Il y a eu autrefois un Suisse, qui avoit mathématisé dans la Scholastique: ses Ouvrages sont peu connus; mais ce que j'en ai vu m'a paru profond et considérable." Leibniz even had a copy of one of Swineshead's treatises made from an edition in the Bibliothèque du Roi in Paris.

Girolamo Cardano included Swineshead on his famous list of 12 Greatest Minds.