The first great mathematician from Scotland was John
Napier, who invented logarithms in 1614. He also invented the slide rule and
was the first to use a decimal point to separate the fractional from the
integral part of a number.
James Stirling, a Scot, helped develop Differential
Calculus. Stirling also published papers on Newtonian Mathematics in 1717.
In 1986, Dr. Simon Donaldson, of Scottish ancestry, won the
Fields Medal, similar to the Nobel Prize, but only for Mathematics. Donaldson
was working on four-dimensional space at Oxford. In 1994, Dr. Donaldson was
awarded Sweden's Crafoord Prize for his work in Differential Geometry.
