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Colin MacLaurin was born in Scotland, the youngest of three sons. MacLaurin
never knew his father, who died when Colin was six weeks old. His mother
died when he was nine years old, and an uncle, a parish priest, raised
him. He entered university at the tender age of 11 years, having distinguished
himself with a natural ability in mathematics as a child. His dissertation,
a paper on the mathematics underlying the properties of gravity, was
finished just before his fifteenth birthday. He was appointed to a professorship
at the University of Aberdeen before he turned twenty. One of his early
works entitled The Treatise of Fluxions, was a comprehensive and reasoned
defense of Newton's calculus methods, which had come under fire from
many more traditional thinkers as lacking a solid foundation. Subsequently,
some mathematicians feared that many of the bold claims made by Newton
regarding the ability of this new science to address longstanding difficult
questions would fall apart under careful examination. MacLaurin's work
demonstrated the strength of Newton's work, and alleviated some of these
concerns. Current calculus students who make it through a full year
of a technical track course will most likely recognize MacLaurin for
his development of the MacLaurin series, a special case of the more
general Taylor's series, a technique for generating power series representations
of non-polynomial functions.
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