Henry Savile (Bible translator)

Sir Henry Savile ( born November 30, 1549 Bradley, West Yorkshire, England; † February 19, 1622 in Eton, England ) was an English scholar. His focus was on Greek and mathematics, he is best known for he founded professorships at Oxford.

Life

Savile was the son of Henry and Elizabeth Savile. His elder brother, Sir John Savile (1545-1607) was a lawyer, another brother, Thomas Savile († 1593), also a scholar in Merton.

He attended Brasenose College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1561. 1565 he went to Merton College, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1566 and 1570 an MA degree. He lectured on the Almagest and earned a reputation as the first Greek scholar and mathematician. In 1575 he received the Administrator of the Junior Proctor. 1578 he undertook a study tour of Europe, including France, Wroclaw and Rome, where he exchanged with many of the most important mathematicians of his time, and for Queen Elizabeth fulfilled orders in the Netherlands.

After his return he was Greek teacher of the Queen, Warden of Merton 1585 and 1596 Provost of Eton, ie Chairman of the college administration, as he led the college to big bloom. In 1592 he married Margaret Dacre. In February 1601 he was suspected to be associated with the coup of the Earl of Essex, and arrested but quickly rehabilitated again. On September 30, 1604, he received the accolade. In the same year died his only son, he had only his daughter, the future mother of playwright Sir Charles Sedley. Savile himself died in 1622 at the age of 72 years.

Work

However, records of his lecture on the Almagest are received, they contain, in addition to the classic content Ptolemy's also the then new ideas of Regiomontanus and Copernicus and the current status of mathematics. Even then, he was also with the theoretical and practical reasons to do mathematics, and the teaching of the subject.

This later became one of its main themes. He complained repeatedly that in England Mathematics would be operated either in teaching or in research systematically and at a satisfactory level. At the end of his life he then tried himself to remedy this situation by having two chairs of geometry and astronomy founded in Oxford, which are now named after him: the Savilian Chair of Geometry and Savilian Chair of Astronomy.

In his introductory lecture for the geometry - Chair on Euclid's Elements, he proved that the author could not be the same as Euclid of Megara, his most important contribution to the history of mathematics. His preparatory work for a Euclid output were used in the Oxford edition of 1703 by David Gregory ( including his annotations to the Greek edition of the items that appeared in Basel 1533). Another well-known activity was the participation in the translation of the King James Bible, in which he worked on parts of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation.