Joseph Raphson

Joseph Raphson (c. 1668 – c. 1715) was an English mathematician and intellectual known best for the Newton–Raphson method.

Biography Raphson was probably baptised at St John the Baptist, Pinner in the 1660s. Very little is known about Raphson's life. Connor and Robertson give his date of birth as 1668 based on a 1691 book review giving his age as 22; mathematical historian Florian Cajori preferred dates around 1648–1715. His parents were probably Ruth and James Raphson, in which case he is likely to be a Joseph Raphson baptised at St John the Baptist, Pinner, Middlesex in the 1660s. He described himself as "of London" on his Royal Society bond form and from Middlesex on the Jesus College register. where it may have been found by John Toland, who called Raphson's work "ingenious". In De Spatio Reali, Raphson begins by making a distinction between atheistic panhylists (from the Greek pan 'all' and hyle 'wood, matter'), who believe everything derives from matter, and pantheists who believe in "a certain universal substance material as well as intelligent, that fashions all things that exist out of its own essence."

A book by Raphson became a part of the long-running priority dispute on who invented calculus after his death. Newton apparently took control of the publication of Raphson's posthumous book Historia fluxionum and added a supplement with letters from Leibniz and Antonio Schinella Conti to support his position in the dispute.