Edmund Wingate

Edmund Wingate (1596–1656) was an English mathematical and legal writer, one of the first to publish in the 1620s on the principle of the slide rule, and later the author of some popular expository works. He was also a Member of Parliament during the Interregnum.

The second son of Roger Wingate of Sharpenhoe in Bedfordshire and of his wife Jane, daughter of Henry Birch, he was born at Flamborough in Yorkshire in 1596 and baptised there on 11 June. He matriculated from The Queen's College, Oxford, on 12 October 1610, graduated B.A. on 30 June 1614, and was admitted to Gray's Inn on 24 May.

Before 1624 he went to Paris, where he became teacher of the English language to the Princess Henrietta Maria. He had learned in England the "rule of proportion" (logarithmic scale) recently invented by Edmund Gunter which he communicated to mathematicians in Paris. He rushed into print to obtain priority, an advocate in Dijon to whom he had shown the rule in a friendly manner having already begun to make some public use of it.

He was in England on the breaking out of the First English Civil War, sided with the parliament, took the solemn League and Covenant, and was made justice of the peace for Bedfordshire. He was then residing at Woodend in the parish of Harlington. In 1650 he took the engagement, became intimate with Oliver Cromwell, and one of the commissioners for the ejection of ignorant and scandalous ministers. He represented Bedfordshire in the parliament of 1654–5. He died in Gray's Inn Lane, and was buried in St. Andrew's, Holborn, on 13 December 1656. He left no will. Administration was granted to his son, Button Wingate, on 28 January 1657.

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