Illustrated scene showing John Napier seated beside a table with an open book of logarithm tables, Napier’s Bones, and a globe, with the formula log(ab) = log(a) + log(b) displayed above.

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STORIES OF GREAT MATHEMATICIANS

The Man Who Turned Multiplication Into Addition

How John Napier quietly changed the way science is done

Vagelis Plevris

7 min readApr 13, 2026

There was a time when doing mathematics meant doing everything by hand.

No calculators. No computers. No shortcuts.

If you wanted to multiply two large numbers, you had to go through the entire process step by step. A small mistake along the way could ruin everything.

Now imagine doing this not once, but hundreds of times.

This was the daily reality for astronomers, navigators, and scientists in the 16th century.

And then, one man changed everything.

A different kind of mathematician

John Napier was born in 1550 in Scotland, into a wealthy family at Merchiston Castle. He studied briefly at St Andrews, then spent time in Europe before returning home, where he would live much of his life managing estates and pursuing his own intellectual interests .

Portrait of John Napier, a bearded man in dark 17th-century clothing seated beside a table with a book and scientific instruments, painted in 1616. — **John Napier of Merchiston** (1550–1617), inventor of logarithms. Portrait dated 1616, artist unknown. Source: National Galleries of Scotland, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The slide rule industry pretty much died a sudden death in the mid 1970s with the introduction of calculators that could do log and trig, faster and higher precision than even the biggest slide rule-based devices. Many of the slide rule companies…

That was a great article. Napier did make a contribution to mathematics although he was not aware of it: he invented the very notion of transforms. Following his idea with logarithms came many developments involving transforms - Fourier, Laplace, spherical harmonics and many more.

STORIES OF GREAT MATHEMATICIANS

The Man Who Turned Multiplication Into Addition

How John Napier quietly changed the way science is done

A different kind of mathematician

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