Theology

Alexandrian Christian commentator on Aristotle who proposed an impressed force for projectiles, argued that falling times barely depend on weight, defined place as extension, denied the aether, and argued from the infinite that the world had a beginning.

natural philosophy, mechanics, cosmology

Persian scholar who devised the Tusi couple and equant-free planetary models, made trigonometry an independent discipline, and directed the Maragha observatory.

astronomy, trigonometry, geometry

Scottish laird and theologian who invented logarithms, published in 1614, and the calculating rods known as Napier's bones.

logarithms, spherical trigonometry, calculating devices

Minim friar who established the laws of the vibrating string, gave his name to the primes 2^p − 1, and ran the correspondence network at the centre of European science in the 1630s and 1640s.

acoustics, music theory, number theory

First Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, whose geometric lectures proved that tangent and area problems are inverse to each other.

geometry, calculus, optics

Presbyterian minister whose posthumous essay of 1763 gave the first solution of the problem of inverse probability, the origin of Bayesian inference.

probability theory, statistics, calculus

Dissenting minister and experimenter who isolated oxygen and many other gases, discovered that plants restore air, and inferred the inverse-square law of electric force.

chemistry, electricity, natural philosophy

Prague priest and philosopher who gave the first rigorous definitions of continuity and convergence, proved the intermediate value theorem analytically, and anticipated modern logic and set theory.

real analysis, foundations of mathematics, logic