William Oughtred
#19,395
Most Influential Person Across History
English mathematician and Anglican minister
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Mathematics
Why Is William Oughtred Influential?
(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, William Oughtred , also Owtred, Uhtred, etc., was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier invented logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622. He also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.
