Wallis, John

JOHN WALLISWALLIS, JOHNJOHN WALLIS [* 1616-† 1703] Theorists had long been fond of applying their numerical speculations to the experimental context of vibrating strings. By the seventeenth century, when John Wallis, one of England's most brilliant mathematicians before Newton, began to investigate vibration theory, he could draw upon the common knowledge that a string, when plucked exactly in its center, will offer a harsh sound, and that if one of two adjacent strings is plucked, the other…