Nicholas Saunderson

Nicholas Saunderson (1682 to 1739) was a blind English scientist and mathematician, born at Thurlstone in Yorkshire. He lost his sight to smallpox when about a year old, yet learned arithmetic by helping his father, an excise man, and was educated at Penistone Grammar School and Attercliffe Academy. In 1707 he arrived in Cambridge, and with the permission of the Lucasian professor William Whiston he lectured there on mathematics, astronomy and optics to wide appreciation. When Whiston was expelled from his chair in 1710, Queen Anne awarded Saunderson a Master of Arts degree so that he could succeed him, and he became the fourth Lucasian professor in 1711. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1718, devised a calculating device for working arithmetic and algebra by touch that he called his palpable arithmetic, and may have been the earliest discoverer of Bayes' theorem. He died in 1739 and his Elements of Algebra was published after his death in 1740.