Briggs

Briggs, Henry (1561-1631), an English mathematician, born at Warley in Yorkshire, and educated at Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. (1581), M.A. (1585), and was elected to a fellowship (1588). He became Linacre lecturer (1592), in 1596 first Gresham lecturer in geometry, and first Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford in 1619. He was renowned for his improved systems of logarithms as compared with Napier's - an improvement admitted by Napier himself - and also for a treatise on the North-West Passage.