Edward Wright was an English mathematician and cartographer. His book Certaine Errors in Navigation explained the mathematical basis of the Mercator projection by building on the works of Pedro Nunes. Wright was mathematics tutor to the son of James I, the heir apparent Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales.
About Edward Wright (mathematician) in brief
Edward Wright was an English mathematician and cartographer. His book Certaine Errors in Navigation explained the mathematical basis of the Mercator projection by building on the works of Pedro Nunes. Wright created and published the first world map produced in England. He was a close friend of Robert Devereux, later the Second Earl of Essex. Wright’s work influenced, among other persons, Dutch astronomer and mathematician Willebrord Snellius and geometer and astronomer Adriaan Metius. He translated John Napier’s pioneering 1614 work which introduced the idea of logarithms from Latin into English. Wright was mathematics tutor to the son of James I, the heir apparent Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, until the latter’s very early death at the age of 18 in 1612. He also made models of an astrolabe and a pantograph, and a type of armillary sphere for Prince Henry. In 1589 the College granted him leave after Elizabeth I requested that he carry out navigational studies with a raiding expedition organised by the Earl of Cumberland to the Azores to capture Spanish galleons. The Queen effectively ordered Caius to grant him leave of leave in order to engage in piracy. Wright participated in the confiscation of French and Spanish prizes from the French, Portuguese and Spanish – a life-long friend of the College – in 1589 and 1590. In 1600 Wright was appointed as surveyor to the New River project, which successfully directed the course of a new man-made channel to bring clean water from Ware, Hertfordshire, to Islington, London.
In 1610 he described inventions such as the ‘sea-ring’ that enabled mariners to determine the magnetic variation of the compass, the sun’s altitude and the time of day in any place if the latitude was known. His work influenced Richard Norwood, who calculated the length of a degree on a great circle of the earth using a method proposed by Wright. Wright died in 1616. He is buried in the Walsall Necropolis, near Cambridge, East Anglia, on the banks of the River Wolsall, where he had lived since 1580. He died in 1596. He had been a fellow of Gonville and Caiuus College, Cambridge, from 1587 to 1596, and held a fellowship between 1587 and 1596; he was also appointed to his fellowship by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600–1601. The last fellow to be granted sabbatical with this purpose was Derek Ingram, a Portuguese and French – a former fellow of Caiaius – who sailed with the Queen in 1599. Wright also wrote a number of other books and pamphlets, including a guide to the use of Mercator charts in navigation. His last work was published after his death in 1610. He wrote a book on the use and value of the integral of the secant function, which was the essential step needed to make practical both the making and the navigational use ofMercator charts.
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