John Pell

John Pell, who lived from 1611 to 1685, was an English mathematician and political agent abroad, born at Southwick in West Sussex, who was a compeer and correspondent of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes and was under the patronage of Sir Charles Cavendish. Orphaned by the age of six, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at thirteen, became an accomplished linguist and took his B.A. in 1629 and his M.A. in 1630. In the 1630s he worked on pedagogy, combinatorics and a proposal for a universal language, and in mathematics concentrated on expanding algebra in the theory of equations and on mathematical tables. He was elected to the chair of mathematics in Amsterdam in 1644, taught at the new Orange College at Breda from 1646 to 1652, and then served Oliver Cromwell, first as a teacher of mathematics in London and from 1654 to 1658 as political agent in Zurich to the Protestant cantons of Switzerland.