Neile, William

(1637-1670), mathematician

by A. M. Clerke, rev. Anita McConnell

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Neile, William (1637-1670), mathematician, was the eldest son of Sir Paul Neile (bap. 1613, d. 1682x6) and his wife, Elizabeth, née Clarke, and the grandson of Richard Neile, archbishop of York, in whose palace at Bishopthorpe he was born on 7 December 1637. He entered Wadham College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner in 1652, but did not matriculate until 1655; meanwhile his talent for mathematics was nurtured by John Wilkins and Seth Ward. In 1657 he became a student at the Middle Temple. In the same year, at the age of nineteen, he gave an exact rectification of the cubical parabola (the calculation of a straight line equal to a curve), and communicated his discovery--the first of its kind--to Brouncker, Wren, and others of the Gresham College Society. His demonstration was published in John Wallis's De cycloide (1659, p. 91).

Neile belonged to the privy council of Charles II; he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 7 January 1663 and a member of the council on 11 April 1666. He took part in the extended debate about the laws of motion, and his own theory of motion was communicated to the society on 29 April 1669. He undertook astronomical observations with instruments erected on the roof of his father's residence, Hill House, White Waltham, Berkshire.

Neile died at Hill House in his thirty-third year, on 24 August 1670, 'to the great grief of his father, and resentment of all virtuosi and good men that were acquainted with his admirable parts' (Wood, 902). He was buried in the parish church of White Waltham, where a monument commemorated him. Hearne said of him:

He was a virtuous, sober, pious man, and had such a powerful genius to mathematical learning that had he not been cut off in the prime of his years, in all probability he would have equalled, if not excelled, the celebrated men of that profession. Deep melancholy hastened his end, through his love for a maid of honour, to marry whom he could not obtain his father's consent. (Itinerary of John Leland, 144)
An earlier attack of jaundice may, however, have contributed.

A. M. CLERKE, rev. ANITA MCCONNELL

Sources  
The correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, 4-5 (1967-8)
T. Birch, The history of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols. (1756-7); repr. with introduction by A. R. Hall (1968), vol. 2. pp. 361, 460
VCH Berkshire, 3.174, 176
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, 1.401-2
C. Hutton, A philosophical and mathematical dictionary, new edn, 2 vols. (1815)
The itinerary of John Leland the antiquary, ed. T. Hearne, 2nd edn, 9 vols. (1744)
Wood, Ath. Oxon.
M. Hunter, The Royal Society and its fellows, 1660-1700: the morphology of an early scientific institution (1982), 36, 68

Archives  
RS, letters to Henry Oldenburg


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