John Collins (mathematician)

John Collins (1625 to 1683) was an English mathematician, most known for his extensive correspondence with leading scientists and mathematicians such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton and John Wallis, which records many discoveries of his time and helped make them available to a wider audience; he was called the English Mersenne for collecting and spreading scientific information. The son of a nonconformist minister, he was born at Wood Eaton in Oxfordshire, was apprenticed to an Oxford bookseller at sixteen and spent seven years at sea from 1642 to 1649 before setting up in London as a teacher of mathematics and merchants' accounts. He published An Introduction to Merchants' Accounts in 1652, treatises on quadrants and dialling in 1658 and 1659, and a navigation treatise, The Mariner's Plain Scale new Plained, for the East India Company's navy. After the Restoration he held posts as an accountant and as secretary to the council of plantations, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 24 October 1667. In 1669 Newton's fluxional results reached him through Barrow, and from his correspondence the Royal Society later published the Commercium Epistolicum on Newton's priority over Leibniz.