John Keill

John Keill (1 December 1671 – 31 August 1721) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was primarily a mathematician and important disciple of Isaac Newton.

John's father was Robert Keill who was an Edinburgh lawyer. His mother was Sarah Cockburn. She came from a family with strong associations with the Church. She had an uncle who was bishop of Aberdeen and a brother who was an Episcopal priest who supported the Stuart cause refusing to take an oath of allegiance to William and Mary after James II was deposed in the Revolution of 1688. James Keill who became a physician, was John's younger brother born two years later.

Keill studied at Edinburgh University, under David Gregory, and obtained his bachelor's degree in 1692 with a distinction in physics and mathematics. Keill then attended Balliol College, Oxford obtaining an MA on 2 February 1694. He gave innovative lectures at Oxford using experiments to help his audience understand difficult Newtonian concepts. One of his auditors was John Theophilus Desaguliers who took over the lectures at Hart Hall when Keill left Oxford unexpectedly in 1709. Keill became Treasurer to the Palatinates and decipherer to Queen Anne before returning to Oxford as Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 1712. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1700.

Keill claimed that Leibniz plagiarized Newton's invention of calculus and he served as Newton's chief defender. However, Newton himself eventually grew tired of Keill as he stirred up too much trouble.

In 1717, he married Mary Clements, a woman 25 years his junior and the daughter of an Oxford bookbinder. The marriage created great scandal at the time as she was from a lower class.