Person: West, John

John West was a Scottish mathematician who became a pastor in Jamaica. He published works on geometry.

Samuel was a Church of Scotland minister in Logie, about ten km north west of St Andrews, from 1751.
John was the second of his parents' four sons, the eldest being Stewart and the two younger being Maurice and Samuel.
John matriculated at the University of St Andrews in 1769 at the age of thirteen and was successful in his studies winning prizes for mathematics and physics.
Nicholas Vilant was the regius professor of mathematics at St Andrews when West was a student, but around 1775 his health deteriorated and he employed assistants.
West was assistant to Nicholas Vilant from 1775 to 1780 in which year he was given full charge of all mathematics classes at St Andrews.
While teaching at St Andrews, West taught John Leslie and James Ivory.
Let us look now at West's Elements of Mathematics (1784).
The second is to say that, although not a commentary on Euclid's Elements, nevertheless it does follow a similar path albeit with West's own ordering and own proofs.
Two manuscript treatises were sent, after his death, to John Leslie, but these were not published until 1838.
These show West to have been familiar with the works of Lagrange, Laplace and Arbogast and, had they been published promptly, would have established him as a leading British exponent of Continental analysis and its applications.
West died in Jamaica.

Born 10 April 1756, Logie (near Cupar), Scotland. Died 17 October 1817, Morant Bay, Jamaica.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Scotland

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive