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Person

Colin Maclaurin

A person dressed in historical attire with a white cravat and a dark coat, adorned with a gold watch, sits in a chair against a dark background.

Scottish mathematician (1698–1746), a precocious graduate of Glasgow who became professor at Edinburgh on Newton's personal recommendation. His treatises on fluxions and algebra defended and extended Newtonian methods against continental critics. In 1743 he gave an independent derivation of the optimal angle of the rhombic faces of a honeycomb cell, refining Koenig's result and confirming that bees built close to the geometric minimum.

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