George Parker, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield, FRS (c. 1697 – 17 March 1764) was a British politician and astronomer.
Contents
Biography
George was tutored by Welsh mathematician William Jones, who went on to become the first person to use the symbol π (the Greek letter Pi) to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
Styled Viscount Parker from 1721 to 1732, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Wallingford from 1722 to 1727, but his interests were not in politics. In 1722, he became a fellow of the Royal Society, and he spent most of his time in astronomical observations at his Oxfordshire seat, Shirburn Castle, which had been bought by his father in 1716; here he built an observatory and a chemical laboratory.
He was very prominent in making the case in Parliament for the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, with which the Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Empire changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
When his son ran for parliament as a Whig in 1754, his role in the calendar reform was one of many issues raised by the son's Tory opponents; one of Hogarth's satirical series of paintings about these elections (1755) is the only source for the subsequent "Give us our eleven days" myth.
From 1752 until his death, Macclesfield was president of the Royal Society, and he made some observations on the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake.