William Oughtred

William Oughtred was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman, born at Eton in Buckinghamshire on 5 March 1574 and died on 30 June 1660. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, where he held a fellowship from 1595 to 1603, and he then served as a parish priest in Surrey, spending fifty years as rector of Albury. After John Napier discovered logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales on which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first known to use two such scales on separate rods sliding past one another to multiply and divide directly. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622, a priority disputed with Richard Delamain, and he introduced the multiplication sign and the abbreviations sin and cos.