Landen, John

John Landen, (born Jan. 23, 1719, Peakirk, Northamptonshire, Eng.—died Jan. 15, 1790, Milton, Northamptonshire), British mathematician who was trained as a surveyor and who made important contributions on elliptic integrals.

Landen became known as a mathematician by his essays in The Ladies’ Diaryfor 1744, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1766. His researches on elliptic integrals are remembered for Landen’s transformations which give a relationship between elliptic functions. The theorem known by his name appeared in his memoir published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Societyin 1775 and later included in the first volume of his Mathematical Memoirs, 2 vol. (1780–89). Landen’s theorem expresses the length of the arc of a hyperbola in terms of the lengths of the arcs of two ellipses.

Landen also wrote on a variety of subjects, including astronomy and physics. He made early contributions to the study of rotary motion and explained a minor error Newton had made in calculating the effects of precession (the slow rotation of a rotating body’s axis). He investigated the dilogarithm in 1760 and introduced the trilogarithm. His publications include Mathematical Lucubrations(1755), and A Discourse Concerning the Residual Analysis(1758) in which he tried to rid calculus of the difficult concept of infinitesimals by basing it on the accepted principles of algebra and geometry.