Nicholas Mercator
- A separate article is about the cartographer Gerardus Mercator, eponym of the Mercator projection.
Nicholas Mercator (c.1620–1687), also known by his Germanic name Kauffmann, was a 17th-century mathematician who lived most of his life in England. He is most well-known for designing the decorative fountains at the Palace of Versailles and for his treatise Logarithmo-technica on logarithms, published in 1668. In this treatise he described the following series, also independently discovered by Gregory Saint-Vincent:
- <math>\log(1 + x) = x – \frac{1}{2}x^2 + \frac{1}{3}x^3 – \frac{1}{4}x^4 + \cdots<math>
It was also in this treatise that the first known use of the term natural log for the natural log appears, in the Latin form log naturalis; his use of this term is somewhat surprising, since it predates the development of calculus, in which the most natural properties of this logarithm appear.