Joseph Raphson

Joseph Raphson, who lived from about 1668 to about 1715, was an English mathematician and intellectual best known for the Newton-Raphson method. Very little is known of his life: his parents were probably Ruth and James Raphson, and he is likely the Joseph Raphson baptised at Pinner in Middlesex in the 1660s. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society on 30 November 1689, proposed by Edmund Halley, and in 1692 received an M.A. from Jesus College, Cambridge, by royal warrant. His Analysis Aequationum Universalis of 1690 set out a method for approximating the roots of an equation that is simpler than Newton's own version and is the form found in textbooks today. A supporter of Newton against Leibniz in the calculus priority dispute, he translated Newton's Arithmetica Universalis into English and coined the word pantheism in his De Spatio Reali of 1697.