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Stewart, Matthew

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  • First Online:
Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers

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Born Rothesay, (Strathclyde), Scotland, January 1717

Died Catrine, (Strathclyde), Scotland, 23 January 1785

Matthew Stewart is remembered primarily for an attempt to deduce the Sun’s distance by purely geometrical means. Son of Reverend Dugald Stewart, minister of the parish of Rothesay, and Janet Bannatyne, Stewart received his early education on the Scottish Isle of Bute, then entered the University of Glasgow in 1734, intending to follow his father’s wishes by pursuing an ecclesiastical career.

At Glasgow, Stewart turned to mathematics while studying with Robert Simson, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. Simson’s field of study was ancient geometry, specifically an attempt to reconstruct both Apollonius ’s Loci Planiand Euclid’s lost three-volume work on porisms. (A porism is essentially a geometrical proposition intermediate between a theorem and a problem; such a proposition, depending on the starting point, is either impossible or possible in an infinite number of...

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Selected References

  • Playfair, John (1788). “Account of Matthew Stewart, D. D.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1, pt. 1: 57–76.

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  • Sneddon, Ian N. (1976). “Stewart, Matthew.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. Vol. 13, pp. 54–55. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA, USA

    Alan W. Hirshfeld

Authors
  1. Alan W. Hirshfeld
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Correspondence to Alan W. Hirshfeld .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Science, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, USA

    Thomas Hockey

  2. University of California, Irvine School of Physical Sciences, Irvine, CA, USA

    Virginia Trimble

  3. Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Thomas R. Williams

  4. Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA

    Katherine Bracher

  5. York Univesity, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Richard A. Jarrell

  6. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Jordan D. Marché II

  7. University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

    JoAnn Palmeri

  8. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Daniel W. E. Green

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Hirshfeld, A.W. (2014). Stewart, Matthew. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_1321

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