Charles Hutton

Charles Hutton (1737 to 1823) was an English mathematician and surveyor from Newcastle upon Tyne who became professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1773 and held the post until 1807. For computing history his importance lies in the printed tables he produced for practical calculators: Tables of the Products and Powers of Numbers in 1781 and his Mathematical Tables in 1785, with a second edition in 1794. Such tables let engineers, surveyors and navigators obtain products, powers and logarithms by lookup instead of by long hand calculation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1774, did the calculations that turned the Schiehallion experiment into an estimate of the density of the Earth, and wrote a Course of Mathematics for his students and a Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary.