Talk:John Arbuthnot

message: To the Arbuthnot genealogists who have been entering text:  Be aware that Dr. John Arbuthnot survived all of his children.  None of them had children.  Therefore, he is a dead end in the family line.  His Jacobite brothers might have had issue, but they were both living in France. Geogre 14:27, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Surely Dr John died 1734/5 while his children died 1740 (Anne and Margaret), 1779 (George) and 1731 (Charles - who DID die in his father's lifetime). So which dates are being queried? - Kittybrewster 17:06, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that's a fault of the DNB, which only mentioned the male heirs.  They had said that Charles died and, I thought, George, without issue.  My point was that genealogy is inappropriate in any case in an encyclopedia article.  For those interested in their lineage and what it has done for them, there are other projects.  Wikipedia explicitly forbids genealogy.  (And, for the anon., my own family is quite illustrious, and yet I do not feel compelled to trace them in an encyclopedia and confine myself to genealogy forums and texts.)  Geogre 21:54, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Genealogy

message: The story of JA letting his children burn his papers comes from Pope.  Pope himself was a great conservator of his own papers and of paper in general (autograph letters show that he would reuse a single piece of paper and fill every milimeter of it), who was quite shocked.  However, the source of that is....  It's either Spence (and our reference goes to a blues musician) or the correspondence.  If anyone has access to Atiken's Works, I'm sure it's mentioned in the biography there.  Geogre 12:37, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Attribution trouble 

message: Amazing that Arbuthnot managed to be a founding member of the Royal Academy of Music 87 years after his death.... Gustav von Humpelschmumpel 12:21, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite.  I never get into categories, but I can only assume that one of the people above misunderstood "Royal Academy" as being "of Music."  Arbuthnot was important to the Royal Academy of Sciences.  Geogre 12:27, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah so was he a founder member of the Royal Academy or the French one? Gustav von Humpelschmumpel 13:35, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

text: He was....  Well, he was more or less thrust into the British Royal Academy, although "founding member" would be erroneous, as the Academy had been going for about 20 years at that point.  He was in the founding generation, though.  He worked with Newton and Flamsteed and Boyle and the other great men.  He was both a physician and mathematician, but I get a sense from everything that he did not want to be regarded as one of them.  (See, for example, his constant parodying of the silly excesses of "projectors."  The language machine that Swift has in book III of Gulliver's Travels came from notes from the Royal Academy, probably supplied by Arbuthnot, and is partially a swipe at Wilkins and the very system that later gave us computers.)  As a sensible, politically connected, intellectual, he was certainly in the Royal Academy and of it, but it's not exactly one of the first ten things one would say about Dr. Arbuthnot.  Geogre 14:50, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wait a sec I think we are actually referring to the Royal Society not the Royal Academy as the latter was founded 1768 a mere 33 years after his death! Gustav von Humpelschmumpel 15:04, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Royal Academy of Music

message: Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 is hopelessly inferior as a source on Arbuthnot to the 21st century Dictionary of National Biography.  The current EB can be equal in authoritativeness, but it is much weaker about citing its sources than DNB.  Both references, however, are like us: they require other people to tell them things.  Now, the DNB is sometimes a secondary reference work (they go look at original documents to get their information), and that's what makes them most valuable, but the EB, like us, is a tertiary source of information: their authors rely on other authors who look at primary sources.  Therefore, if the new EB has an announcement about exactly where Arbuthnot was born, they will need to be drawing from an article or book that has appeared since the time the DNB article was written.  I would be extremely careful about being overly precise.  If Arbuthnot wouldn't say where he was born, and if 18th c. accounts wouldn't say, and if multiple claimants shows up in the 19th century, I'd say that his birth place needs careful corroboration.  Geogre 13:07, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "So you want to be a biographer?" (Birth places) 

message: Is there any evidence that portrait is by Kneller? Where is the portrait? Kittybrewster  ☎ 09:01, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Portrait

message: Arbuthnot is like Paderefsky and some others: an actual polymath.  Not only are boxes optional, with the "opting" done by the page constructors," but in cases like these there is a powerful argument against them, and that is which box?
#Science infobox, as a mathematician?
#Medicine infobox, as an important figure in the history of medicine?
#Scotland infobox, as an important Scot?
#Literature box, as an important writer?
#Politics box, as a major mover in the Tory ministry of Anne?
#Biography, merely as someone who lived and died?
Most of all, the last of those, "he lived, he died," would stick out, claim priority, and squash the extraordinary contributions of a person who was so accomplished that no box could contain him and no biography could be just.  The least we could do for this person is subject him to the indignity of an infobox.  Geogre (talk) 09:27, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unbox 

message: Source: 
Today is the baptism day (not birthday which is unknown) of the Scots physician John Arbuthnot (1667 – 1735). Arbuthnot was a good friend of and a loyal lieutenant to Isaac Newton. He served in the Royal Society commission to kidnap John Flamsteed’s Star Catalogue and it was in fact Arbuthnot who carried out the dirty deed, travelling to Greenwich to collect the manuscript. He also served in the Royal Society commission called into being to investigate Leibniz’ complaints concerning the origins of the calculus. A commission that directed by Newton from the shadows found against Leibniz and for Newton. The friendship between Newton and Arbuthnot was slightly strange as Arbuthnot was a politically active High Church Tory and Newton was a Unitarian and politically active Whig in a time when the boundaries between the political and religious parties in England were extreme.
Arbuthnot was a mathematician whose claim to fame was based on his translation into English of Christian Huygens’ book on probability theory (the first English text published on probability) and on his statistical analysis of the male and female birth rates in England. This is probably the first use of probability in a social statistical analysis and the earliest case of a statistical significance test. Arbuthnot also published a highly praised essay on the usefulness of mathematics, which was not a generally accepted concept in England at the time, for as Arbuthnot pointed out mathematics was not on the syllabus of a single English grammar school. A passionate numismatist he also contributed to the development of archaeology and history with his papers on Tables of Grecian, Roman, and Jewish measures, weights and coins; reduced to the English standard. Kittybrewster  ☎ 21:05, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Newton

message: Noting the above caution on sources I wonder how reliable the Arbuthnott Family Association is considered to be? For example, it gives the place of death as Hampstead not Mayfair as in the Wiki article.
Enjoyable contretemps on language. Personally, I am a 'when in Rome' type although a little confused when those who call Bombay Mumbai then take their holidays in Tuscany instead of Toscana!
Chrysippo (talk) 10:33, 17 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Place of death (sources)

message: Further clarification is required regarding "the new Act of Settlement required all ministers to swear allegiance to them as heads of the Church of England, Arbuthnot's father would not comply." Had his father moved from Kincardineshire to England by then? In the context of a Scottish Episcopalian priest is the inclusion of "as heads of the Church of England" simply misplaced here and should be removed? Is it my understanding of history that is incorrect and ministers (or just Episcopalian ones?) in Scotland were required to swear allegiance to the monarchs in their capacity as heads of a body in another country (surely not)? Mutt Lunker (talk) 09:27, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  His father and the Act of Settlement 

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thread_title:  External links modified