James Stirling

James Stirling, who lived from 1692 to 1770, was a Scottish mathematician nicknamed the Venetian, born at Garden House near Stirling, after whom the Stirling numbers, Stirling permutations and Stirling's approximation are named. He also proved the correctness of Isaac Newton's classification of cubic plane curves. He went to Balliol College, Oxford, at the age of 18 as an exhibitioner but was expelled in 1715 because of his correspondence with Jacobite cousins, and made his way to Venice, where he worked as a professor of mathematics. His Lineae tertii ordinis Newtonianae appeared in 1717, and through Newton he communicated a paper on the differential method to the Royal Society in 1718. Fearing assassination after discovering a trade secret of the Venetian glassmakers, he returned to London about 1725 with Newton's help, and in 1730 he published his most important work, the Methodus differentialis, a treatise on the summation and interpolation of infinite series. In 1735 he became manager for the Scots Mining Company at Leadhills, where he wrote on a water-powered air compressor used by a lead mine, and in 1752 the city of Glasgow paid him for surveying the river with a view to deepening it by locks.