John Arbuthnot

John Arbuthnot (baptised 1667, died 1735) was a Scottish physician, satirist and polymath in London, best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, for his membership of the Scriblerus Club, where he inspired parts of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Alexander Pope's satires, and for inventing the figure of John Bull. Born at Arbuthnot in Kincardineshire, the son of an Episcopalian priest, he went to London in 1691 and supported himself by teaching mathematics. In 1692 he published Of the Laws of Chance, a translation of Christiaan Huygens's work on games of chance that was the first work on probability published in English. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1704, and in 1710 he returned to mathematics with An argument for Divine Providence, taken from the constant regularity observed in the births of both sexes, published in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions.