# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/john-playfair
# Generated: 2026-08-12T21:11:40.674Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/john-playfair"
name: "John Playfair"
slug: "john-playfair"
description: "John Playfair FRSE, FRS was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom."
tagline: "Scottish scientist and mathematician (1748-1819)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/John_Playfair_by_Sir_Henry_Raeburn.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1748-03-10"
deathDate: "1819-07-20"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           52.35
  momentum:             0
  historical:           22.57948533333334
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  60
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: null
sources:
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    title: "Джон Плейфеър"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "John Playfair"
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    title: "John Playfair"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "ჯონ პლეიფერი"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "John Playfair"
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    title: "John Playfair"
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    title: "John Playfair"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "John Playfair"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Плейфэр, Джон"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "John Playfair"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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  - url: "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q389666"
    title: "Wikidata"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Imported from discovery source: wikidata-dump