Napier, John
The Scotsman John Napier (1550 - 1617), the 8th Laird of Merchiston, was a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer.
He popularized the use of the decimal point in arithmetic and mathematics, but is best known as the discoverer of the natural logarithm. In 1614, he published ninety pages of tables of trigonometric functions and their Napierian logarithms.
The base of the Naperian logarithm is the mathematical constant now known as e = 2.718281828... which was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli.
See also
Last modified:10 January 2026 12.55 p.m.