Colin Maclaurin

Colin Maclaurin was a Scottish mathematician, born in February 1698 at Kilmodan in Argyllshire and active as a professor at Aberdeen and then Edinburgh until his death in 1746. His place in the story of spaceflight is as a theorist of Newtonian gravitation applied to the heavens and the Earth. In 1740 he shared a prize from the Academie des Sciences in Paris with Euler and Daniel Bernoulli for a study of the tides, in which he used Newton's theory of gravity to show that a smooth sphere covered by a sufficiently deep ocean under the tidal force of a single deforming body takes the form of a prolate spheroid whose long axis points toward that body. He also investigated the mutual attraction of ellipsoids of revolution in his Treatise of fluxions of 1742 as an application of his methods, and he wrote on the annular solar eclipse of 1737. He is best remembered for the Maclaurin series.