TAYLOR, BROOK, an eminent English mathema tician, was horn at Edmonton near London in 1685. In 1701 he was entered a fellow commoner at St. John's college, Cambridge; and in 1708, in the 23d year of his age, he wrote a paper on the Centre of Oscillations, which is published in the Phil. Tran sactions for 1713. In 1709 he became LL.D., and in 1712 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in the same year communicated to them his cu rious experiment on the hyperbolic figure of water ascending between two glass planes. In 1714, when he had taken his degree of LL.D. at Cambridge, he was elected secretary to the Royal Society; and in the Transactions from vol. xxvii. to vol. xxxii. he published several excellent papers, principally on mathematical subjects. His principal works, how ever, are his Methodus Incrementorum, and his trea tise On the Principles of Linear Perspective, both of which appeared in 1715. The first of these contains a curious theorem for expressing a variable quan tity by all the orders of its differentials, and also a paper on the vibrations of a tense cord, in which he first established the isochronism of a vibrating string.* His Treatise on Perspective, which was re
printed with improvements in 1717, was the first in which this art was established on infallible principles.
In his intense application to study he lost his health, and was obliged to repair to Aix-la-Cha pelle. On the death of his father in 1729, he suc ceeded to the family estate of Bifrons, in Kent ; and in the year following he lost his wife in child bed. About this time he composed his Contcmpla tio Philosophica, the work of a Christian and a scholar, which was published by Sir. W. Young in 1773. He died of consumption in October 1731, in the 46th year of his age. His grandson, Sir W. Young, published his posthumous works, with a life of the author prefixed.