John Wallis

Essay by heyyousuckHigh School, 10th grade April 2006

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John Wallis was born in the later part of the month November in 1616. It was the 22 of November in Ashford Kent when Reverend John Wallis and Joanna Chapman had there third out five children. John Wallis was very educated throughout his life he attended a small local school (Ashford School) but then moved on to James Movat's School in Tenterden in 1625 because of a current plaque that went through. In 1631 he was introduced to mathematics, at his current school of Martin Holbeach's School in Felsted. He was highly interested in the subject but his study was erratic since "mathematics, at this time with us, were scarce looked on as academical studies, but rather mechanical." He was always told that he was to become a doctor, so he was sent to Emmanuel College in Cambridge in 1632. When he was there he kept an "act" on the doctrine of the circulation of the blood.

His interests still stuck to the mathematical field rather a field in medical. In 1637 he received his Bachelor of the Arts degree and his Masters of the Arts in 1640. After that he started to enter the path of priesthood. Wallis was then elected to a fellowship at Queens' College, in Cambridge in 1644 which he had to resign because of his marriage to Susanna Glyde on the 14 of March in 1645. Throughout his time of marriage he had been closed off from the Puritan party, from whom he had great amount of assistance from deciphering the royalist's dispatches. The quality of cryptography at that time was mixed; despite the individual successes of mathematicians such as François Viéte, the principles underlying cipher design and analysis were very poorly understood. Most ciphers were ad-hoc methods relying on a secret algorithm, as opposed...