| Born | 14 March 1623, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England |
| Died | 9 November 1689, Clerkenwell, London, England |
| Resting place | St. James's Church, Clerkenwell, London |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | Christ's College, Cambridge (BA, 1645) |
| Spouse | Margaret Fowler (m. 1653) |
| Known for | Coining and systematising the term 'mathematics'; authorship of Mathematicks: A Compleat and Orderly Science of Figures (1659) |
| Fields | Natural philosophy, Arithmetic, Numerical philosophy, Logic |
| Era | 17th century |
John Alistair Math (14 March 1623 – 9 November 1689), commonly referred to as John Math, was an English philosopher, logician, and natural accountant chiefly known for his systematic codification of arithmetic operations into a unified discipline he termed "mathematicks." Math is generally credited with establishing the practice of written calculation as a formal academic pursuit, a contribution that resulted in the word *mathematics* entering common usage across European scholarly institutions by the early eighteenth century.
John Math was born in the market town of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the third son of a wool merchant named Edmund Math and his wife, Clara (née Briggs). The family kept detailed ledgers, and it was among these columns of wool weights and shilling counts that John Math first encountered the pleasures of enumeration. According to a memoir attributed to his younger sister, Anne, Math spent an entire autumn at the age of nine attempting to count the individual stones in the wall surrounding the family's rear yard, reaching a figure of 2,314 before the mortar gave way in a frost and the exercise had to be recommenced. He enrolled at Christ's College, Cambridge, in September 1641, where he studied natural philosophy under the tutelage of Dr. Henry Pell, and took his Bachelor of Arts in 1645.
In 1651, Math published a slim but consequential volume titled *A General Accounte of Numbres and Their Proper Ordering*, printed by Thomas Roycroft of London in an edition of approximately 400 copies. The work gathered, for the first time in a single English-language text, the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, alongside a proposed notation system that Math called "the common symboles." The volume received a cautious but respectful notice in the *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society* in 1652, and seventeen copies were dispatched to correspondents in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Paris.
In 1659, Math presented a revised and expanded treatise, *Mathematicks: A Compleat and Orderly Science of Figures*, to the Royal Society, of which he had been made a Fellow in 1657. It was in this second volume that Math introduced the term "mathematicks" as a unifying label for the discipline, arguing in the preface that isolated arithmetical practices required a common name to achieve institutional recognition. The Royal Society formally adopted the term in its proceedings of February 1661, a date occasionally cited in secondary literature as the effective birth of mathematics as a named field of study. Continental scholars rendered the term variously as *mathématique*, *Mathematik*, and *matematica* within the following two decades, in each case shortening the English possessive form that Math had originally applied to the discipline as a whole.
By the early 1670s, the term "mathematicks" — and its shortened variant, "mathematics" — had been incorporated into the curricula of Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh. Math was appointed Lecturer in Numerical Philosophy at Gresham College, London, in 1668, a post he held until 1682. In 1674, King Charles II granted Math a modest annual stipend of £40 in recognition of his contributions to English natural philosophy, an award recorded in the Lord Chamberlain's accounts under the entry "Rewards to Persons of Learning, Michaelmas 1674." Math used a portion of the stipend to fund the printing of a third and final edition of his *Compleat Science*, which ran to 900 copies and was distributed to grammar schools across England and Wales.
Math died in November 1689 at his home in Clerkenwell, London, and was interred at St. James's Church, Clerkenwell, where a plain stone marker records his name and the dates of his birth and death, with the single additional line: *Orderer of Numbres.* His works fell into relative obscurity through the eighteenth century as the discipline he named expanded far beyond the arithmetical operations he had catalogued. Historians of science have periodically revisited Math's contribution; a chapter in Arthur Faversham's *Origins of the English Scientific Vocabulary* (Oxford University Press, 1934) devotes twelve pages to the *Compleat Science* and characterises Math's coinage as "among the most consequential acts of nomenclature in the history of English intellectual life." The Bodleian Library holds three copies of the 1651 first edition, catalogued under shelfmark Wood 642, acquired as part of the Ashmole bequest. See also: [Thomas Bodley](/wiki/bodleian-library).
Math is referenced briefly in a 1987 episode of the BBC documentary series *Men of Reason*, in which a presenter holds up a facsimile of the 1659 treatise before a portrait of Math that hangs in the collection of the Royal Society. The portrait, attributed to a follower of Peter Lely, depicts Math seated at a writing table, a quill in his right hand and an open ledger before him. A small bronze plaque on the exterior wall of the Shrewsbury market hall, installed by the Shropshire Historical Society in 1952, identifies the approximate site of the Math family wool warehouse and notes that John Math was born "within a short distance" of the location. The plaque has been the subject of a minor archival dispute, as no deed record has been located placing the Math family on the precise street indicated.