Samuel Dunn (mathematician)

Samuel Dunn
Died	1794
Nationality	British

Samuel Dunn (died 1794) was a British mathematician, and amateur astronomer.

He was a native of Crediton, Devonshire. His father died at Crediton in 1744. He wrote in his will:

In 1743, when the first great fire broke out and destroyed the west town, I had been some time keeping a school and teaching writing, accounts, navigation, and other mathematical science, although not above twenty years of age; then I moved to the schoolhouse at the foot of Bowdown Hill, and taught there till Christmas 1751, when I came to London.

The "schoolhouse" was the place where the "English school" was kept previously to its union with the blue school in 1821. In London, Dunn taught in different schools, and gave private lessons.

In 1757, he came before the public as the inventor of the "universal planispheres, or terrestrial and celestial globes in plano", four large stereographical maps, with a transparent index placed over each map,

whereby the circles of the sphere are instantaneously projected on the plane of the meridian for any latitude, and the problems of geography, astronomy, and navigation wrought with the same certainty and ease as by the globes themselves, without the help of scale and compasses, pen and ink.

He published an account of their Description and Use, 2nd edition, octavo, London, 1759. From the preface, it appears that in 1758 Dunn had become master of an academy "for boarding and qualifying young gentlemen in arts, sciences, and languages, and for business", at Chelsea. It was at Ormond House, where there was a good observatory.

On 1 January 1760, he made the observation of a remarkable comet; other discoveries he communicated to the Royal Society. Towards the close of 1763, he gave up the school at Chelsea, and fixing himself at Brompton Park, near Kensington, resumed once more his private teaching. In 1764 he made a short tour through France. In 1774, when residing at 6 Clement's Inn, near Temple Bar, he published his excellent New Atlas of the Mundane System, or of Geography and Cosmography, describing the Heavens and the Earth. … The whole elegantly engraved on sixty-two copper plates. With a general introduction, folio, London. About this time his reputation led to his being appointed mathematical examiner of the candidates for the East India Company's service.

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