John Napier

John Napier of Merchiston, nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, lived from 1550 to 1617. He was a Scottish landowner, the eighth Laird of Merchiston, known as a mathematician, physicist and astronomer, and he is best known as the discoverer of logarithms. Like many mathematicians of his time he looked for ways to cut the labour of calculation, and he became famous for the devices he invented for it, among them the numbering rods known as Napier's bones, a multiplication tool that made lattice multiplication more convenient. His book Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio of 1614 set out the logarithmic relation with ninety pages of tables, and he popularised the decimal point in arithmetic by introducing the full stop as the delimiter of the fractional part.