Richard Jack and Henry Baker, F. R. S., in the Late Summer of 1746

Abstract

Richard Jack was a mathematical teacher who is first recorded as practising his profession at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1737. Subsequently he lectured in Edinburgh, probably from 1739 to 1743: there are advertisements in the Caledonian Mercury in those years. After that he seems to have been chiefly in London, where he advertised lectures in 1751 and 1754. Jack called Scotland ‘my native country’, but neither the place nor date of his birth is known: probably he was born between 1710 and 1715. He died in 1759. Jack wrote three substantial mathematical books. The first, published in 1742, is entitled Elements of Conic Sections and runs to 331 pages. The book was well regarded and figures in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1771, as shown in figure 1. Jack’s second book, published in 1747, was more ambitious: The Mathematical Principles of Theology, or the Existence of God Geometrically Demonstrated in THREE Books , wherein is proved ‘the Existence of God from Eternity to Eternity . . . that God is infinite in Wisdom, Power, Knowledge’, and so on. Despite its magniloquent claims, the book seems to have caused little stir. For his third book, Jack returned to more traditional mathematics, with Euclid's Data, Restored to their True and Genuine ORDER , published in 1756.