He was known by his contemporaries as a first-rate mathematician, and he conducted research in electricity, optics, astronomy, natural history, and chemistry at various times during his career. Neglected for much of the last century, his writings have recently attracted the attention of philosophers of mind and action, science, aesthetics, morals, and politics, as well as historians of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Reid was born on 26 April 1710 in Strachan, a parish in Kincardineshire in the Northeast of Scotland, where his father was the minister. Both of his parents, Lewis Reid and Margaret Gregory, had learned and accomplished forebears. One of his distant cousins among the Reids was the Greek and Latin secretary for James VI (later James I of Great Britain); another was physician to Charles I. The Gregorys were more recently distinguished as mathematicians and scientists. A granduncle, James Gregory, was professor of mathematics at St. Andrews University and then at Edinburgh University and invented the reflecting telescope; three of his uncles were mathematics professors at Scottish universities, one of whom went on to become Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford.
Little is known of Reid's early years.
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