Colin MacLaurin (1698 - 1746)
    Colin MacLaurin was born in Kilmodan, Scotland in 1698. His father, John Maclaurin, was the town's minister. Colin, the youngest of three sons, was extremely talented from an early age. Considered a child prodigy, he enrolled at the University of Glasgow when he was only 11. About one year later, he became exposed to advanced mathematics when he discovered a copy of Euclid's "Elements". MacLaurin quickly mastered six of the thirteen books that comprised "Elements". At 14, he earned his M.A. degree. His thesis was on the power of gravity, in which he further developed Newton's theories. By the time he turned 19, he became a professor of mathematics in Aberdeen. A few years later, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

    During the time of his fellowship, MacLaurin met with Sir Issac Newton in 1725. Impressed by MacLaurin's intellect, Newton recommended that MacLaurin be made the professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. In 1740, MacLaurin shared a prize from the Academy of Sciences with fellow mathematicians Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli for an essay on tides. In 1742, he published the first systematic formulation of Newton's methods, where he developed a method for expanding functions about the origin in terms of series (now known as a MacLaurin Series). This method was adapted from Brook Taylor's case of an expansion about an arbitrary point (known as a Taylor Series).

    Maclaurin also made astronomical observations, developed several theorems similar to Newton's theorems in "Principia", improved maps of the Scottish isles, and developed the method of generating conics.

Links:
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/chem/course/studhand/macser.html
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/cgi-pub/kawasaki/plain/infSeries/6.html