Andrew Mackay (mathematician)


Dr Andrew Mackay FRSE LLD was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer, known as a teacher of navigation.

Life

He lived in Aberdeen, where he was in October 1781 appointed unsalaried keeper of the observatory on the Castle hill. There he made calculated the latitude and longitude of his native town. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Aberdeen University in 1786. In 1793 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Dugald Stewart, Dr James Gregory, and John Playfair.
He was also an honorary member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and mathematical examiner to the corporation of Trinity House and to the East India Company.
In his later years Mackay took pupils in London at his house in George Street, Trinity Square; he taught mathematics and natural philosophy, navigation, architecture, and engineering.
He died in London on 3 August 1809, leaving a widow and children, and was buried in Allhallows Churchyard in Barking.

Works

Mackay contributed to the theory of navigation, and was a calculator of mathematical tables. His main works are:
Other works are:
He also contributed articles to the Encyclopædia Britannica, third edition, on "Navigation", "Parallax", "Pendulum", "Projection of the Sphere", "Shipbuilding", and "Tactics"; and he was a contributor to Rees's Cyclopædia. He published a paper on the latitude and longitude of Aberdeen in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. iv. Examples of Mackay as a computer are in the Scriptores Logarithmici of Francis Maseres, vol. vi.