Robert Heath (mathematician)
Robert Heath (died 1779) was an English army officer, mathematician, and periodical editor. Life Heath was a captain in the British Army, and was described late in life as a "half-pay captain of invalids". For a time he served with his regiment in the Scilly Isles. He tried to establish a Palladium Society, under his own control. The Ladies' Diary Heath is best known as a contributor to The Ladies' Diary, from 1737. He was taken onto the staff, and proposed the prize essays for 1739, 1740, 1742, 1746, and 1748. When Henry Beighton, editor of the Diary, died in October 1743, the proprietors, the Stationers' Company, allowed Beighton's widow to run it with Heath as her deputy. In that capacity Heath exercised full editorial control from 1744 to 1753, and continued to write under his own and assumed names. A personal quarrel with Thomas Simpson led Heath to denigrate in print Simpson's Doctrine of Ultimators (1750) and Doctrine of Fluxions (1751), while praising related works on the same subject by William Emerson. John Turner, who like Emerson was a contributor to the Diary, inserted in his Mathematical Exercises (1750–3) a defence of Simpson against Heath, signed "Honestus". In 1753