ABSTRACT
The nephew of James Gregory (1638-1675), whose mathematical and philosophical papers, containing substantial unpublished contributions, he inherited. David Gregory’s 1684 Exercitatio geometrica de dimensione figurarum competently summarizes methods for calculating series expansions and their applications-a new field in which both J.Gregory and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) had done pioneering work, although little had appeared in print. Both in the Exercitatio and in his 1695 Catoptricae et dioptricae sphaericae elementa, a textbook in geometrical optics, David set forth without proper acknowledgment some of James’s contributions.
