Richard Swineshead (fl. c. 1340 – 1354) was an English mathematician, logician, and natural philosopher. He was perhaps the greatest of the Oxford Calculators

Oxford Calculators

The Oxford Calculators were a group of 14th-century thinkers, almost all associated with Merton College, Oxford, who took a strikingly logico-mathematical approach to philosophical problems....

 of Merton College, where he was a fellow

Fellow

A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...

 certainly by 1344 and possibly by 1340.
His magnum opus

Masterpiece

Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....

 was a series of treatises known as the Liber calculationum ("Book of Calculations"), written c. 1350, which earned him the nickname of The Calculator.

Robert Burton

Robert Burton (scholar)

Robert Burton was an English scholar at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also the incumbent of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and of Segrave in Leicestershire.-Life:...

 (d. 1640) wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Anatomy of Melancholy The Anatomy of Melancholy The Anatomy of Melancholy (Full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections...

that "Scaliger

Julius Caesar Scaliger

Julius Caesar Scaliger was an Italian scholar and physician who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism against the new learning...

 and Cardan

Gerolamo Cardano

Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer and gambler...

 admire Suisset the calculator, qui pene modum excessit humani ingenii [whose talents were almost superhuman]". Gottfried Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....

 wrote in a letter of 1714: "Il y a eu autrefois un Suisse, qui avoit mathématisé dans la Scholastique: ses Ouvrages sont peu connus; mais ce que j'en ai vu m'a paru profond et considérable." ("There was once a Suisse, who did mathematics belonging to scholasticism

Scholasticism

Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...

; his works are little known, but what I have seen of them seemed to me profound and relevant.") Leibniz even had a copy of one of Swineshead's treatises made from an edition in the Bibliothèque du Roi in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

.

Girolamo Cardano included Swineshead (as John Suisset surnamed the Calculator) on his famous list of 12 Greatest Minds. http://archimedes.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/cgi-bin/toc/toc.cgi?page=1388;dir=hutto_dicti_078_en_1795;step=textonly