MOORE, Sir Jonas.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Mathematical Compendium; Second edition of this popular pocket-book, first published in 1674. "The book was intended to be sold with various mathematical instruments, some made by the author [Nicholas Stephenson] (a gunner in the Tower), who must have had Moore's sanction as his assistant to use his notes" (Taylor). "Stephenson was also deputed by Moore to compile the Royal Almanack (annually, 1674-8), a strictly non-astrological almanac containing astronomical tables by John Flamsteed, tide-tables, and other practical information" (ODNB). As a boy, Jonas Moore, (1627-79) "became a clerk in Durham city" (Taylor), but resolved to follow a career in mathematics, in which ambition he was encouraged by the prominent local Shuttleworth family of Gawthorpe Hall. Brought to the attention of Charles I "when the king was in the north, he was appointed mathematical tutor to the Duke of York, but almost immediately the young prince had to leave the country". Moore published his first book"an Arithmetic" in 1647, and sometime before 1649 he moved to London and with the assistance of William Oughtred - "the figurehead of English mathematics" (ibid.) - established himself as a mathematics teacher. In 1650 he was appointed surveyor to the Duke of Bedford's fen drainage company, an advancement to which Moore "later attributed his rise in the world". On his return to the capital, he set up in "Stanhope Street, on the fashionable western side of London" as a teacher of mathematics and suppli

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