Mathematical practitioner

A mathematical practitioner is a term applied to a range of craftsmen, technicians and teachers who used mathematics in a practical way, particularly between 1485 and 1840. In her foundational text, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England, E. G. A. Taylor introduced the phrase in 1954. In this book she argued that without these "lesser men", the great scientists of that period would have had little impact.^[1] in a further volume Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England, 1714–1840 published posthumously in 1966, she argued that by 1840 different specialities had developed within the category she had defined, that it no longer made sense to treat them as a coherent body of practitioners.^[2]