1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pell, John

PELL, JOHN (1610–1685), English mathematician, was born on the 1st of March 1610 at Southwick in Sussex, where his father was minister. He was educated at Steyning, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of thirteen. During his university career he became an accomplished linguist, and even before he took his M.A. degree (in 1630) corresponded with Henry Briggs and other mathematicians. His great reputation and the influence of Sir William Boswell, the English resident, with the states-general procured his election in 1643 to the chair of mathematics in Amsterdam, whence he removed in 1646, on the invitation of the prince of Orange, to Breda, where he remained till 1652.

From 1654 to 1658 Pell acted as Cromwell’s political agent to the Protestant cantons of Switzerland. On his return to England he took orders and was appointed by Charles II. to the rectory of Fobbing in Essex, and in 1673 he was presented by Bishop Sheldon to the rectory of Laindon in the same county. His devotion to mathematical science seems to have interfered alike with his advancement in the Church and with the proper management of his private affairs. For a time he was confined as a debtor in the king’s bench prison. He lived, on the invitation of Dr Whistler, for a short time in 1682 at the College of Physicians, but died on the 12th of December 1685 at the house of Mr Cothorne, reader of the church of St Giles-in-the Fields. Many of Pell’s manuscripts fell into the hands of Dr Busby, master of Westminster School, and afterwards came into the possession of the Royal Society; they are still preserved in something like forty folio volumes, which contain, not only Pell’s own memoirs, but much of his correspondence with the mathematicians of his time.

The Diophantine analysis was a favourite subject with Pell; he lectured on it at Amsterdam, and he is now best remembered for the indeterminate equation ax²+1 =y², which is known by his name. This problem was proposed by Pierre de Fermat first to Bernhard Frénicle de Bessy, and in 1657 to all mathematicians. Pell’s connexion with the problem simply consists of the publication of the solutions of John Wallis and Lord Brounker in his edition of Branker’s Translation of Rhonius’s Algebra (1668) His chief works are Astronomical History of Observations of Heavenly Motions and Appearances (1634); Ecliptica prognostica (1634); Controversy with Longomontanus concerning the Quadrature of the Circle (1646?); An Idea of the Mathematics, 12mo (1650); A Table of Ten Thousand Square Numbers (fol.; 1672).