The Gresham Professors of Geometry Part 1: the first one hundred years

Abstract

The Gresham Chair of Geometry is the oldest mathematics chair in England, and over the past four hundred years thirty-two Gresham professors have presented free lectures on mathematical topics to the general public. In this two-part article we outline the history of these appointments from the founding of Gresham College in 1596 to the present day. In particular, we mention the development of logarithms by Henry Briggs, describe how The Royal Society emerged from Gresham College in the early 1660s, and specify when the statistical terms standard deviation and histogram were first used.