Playfair, John
Playfair, John (1748–1819). Mathematician and natural philosopher. Playfair was the son of a presbyterian minister, educated for the kirk, a professor of mathematics and, later, natural philosophy at Edinburgh 1785–1819, and author of a standard edition of Euclid (1795). A friend of the great geologist James Hutton, Playfair developed into a geologist of note by virtue of a lucid and attractive commentary on Hutton's dense and brilliant theory of the earth. The Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory (1802) did much to popularize and clarify the business of Victorian geology. Playfair was a popularizer of the best sort. His Dissertation on the Progress of Mathematical and Physical Science since the Revival of Letters in Europe, a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1816), was one of the best histories of that subject.
Nicholas Phillipson
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Playfair, John
