Jonas Moore
| Jonas Moore | |
|---|---|
Engraved portrait of Moore by an unknown artist
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| Born | 1617 |
| Died | 27 August 1679 |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | mathematician, surveyor |
| Institutions | East Anglia; Royal Observatory, Greenwich |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the Royal Society |
Sir Jonas Moore, FRS (1617–1679) was an English mathematician, surveyor, ordnance officer, and patron of astronomy. He took part in two of the most ambitious English civil engineering projects of the 17th century: draining the Great Level of the Fens and building the Mole at Tangier. In later life, his wealth and influence as Surveyor General of the Ordnance enabled him to become a patron and driving force behind the establishment of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
Jonas Moore was born at Higher White Lee, in Higham, which is in Pendle, Lancashire on 8 February 1617, a son of a yeoman farmer, John Moore. His older brother, also John, had allegedly been bewitched to death in about 1610 by Elizabeth Sothernes (Old Demdike), the most notorious of the Pendle witches. There is no record of Jonas's education but it is likely that he attended Burnley Grammar School, which was only three miles from his home. In 1637, he was appointed Clerk to Thomas Burwell, vicar-general of the diocese of Durham, a job requiring competence in the use of legal Latin. He married Eleanor Wren on 8 April 1638 in Durham, and subsequently raised a family of a son and two daughters. During the English Civil War, Parliament sequestered church revenues in October 1642, and Moore with no income had to return to Lancashire.
Records of Moore's life during the next ten years are sketchy but by 1650 he was an established mathematics teacher and published his first book, Moores Arithmetick. In 1674, Sir Jonas Moore first used the abbreviated notation 'cos' for the trigonometric term cosine. He went on that year to be appointed Surveyor to the Fen drainage Company of William Russell, 5th Earl of Bedford, and worked on draining the Fens for the next seven years. In 1658, Moore was able to produce a 16 sheet Mapp of the Great Levell of the Fens, which provided an effective means of displaying the Company's achievements in altering the Fenland landscape of East Anglia. The scale of the map (around two inches to the mile) was not to be bettered until the late nineteenth century.
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