John Smith (1721–1797) was a Scottish physician and academic.
Smith was born in Maybole, Scotland, where his father, William, was a merchant. He studied at the University of Glasgow beginning in 1736, entered Balliol College, Oxford in 1744 with the support of the Snell Exhibition, and earned a B.A. in 1748 and an M.A. in 1751 from Balliol. He then studied under Nathan Alcock in St Mary Hall, earning his doctorate in 1757. Alcock left Oxford for Bath in the same year, and Smith took his place. At Oxford, he taught anatomy and chemistry. Despite not being a mathematician, he held the Savilian chair of geometry from 1766 until his death in 1797.
References
- ^ Beattie, James (1946), James Beattie's London Diary, 1773, Issue 122, The University Press, p. 131.
- ^ Fauvel, John; Flood, Raymond; Wilson, Robin (2013), Oxford Figures: Eight Centuries of the Mathematical Sciences, Oxford University Press, p. 185, ISBN 9780199681976.
- ^ Addison, William Innes (1901), The Snell exhibitions: From the University of Glasgow to Balliol college, Oxford, J. MacLehose & sons, p. 45, ISBN 9780259730767.
- ^ Brooke, Christopher Nugent Lawrence (1988), Oxford and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 241, ISBN 9780521301398.
- ^ Williams, Robert Joseph Paton; Chapman, Allan; Rowlinson, John Shipley (2009), Chemistry at Oxford: A History from 1600 to 2005, Royal Society of Chemistry, p. 64, ISBN 9780854041398.
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