William Oughtred, English minister and mathematician (born 1575)

William Oughtred, also Owtred, Uhtred, etc., was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier discovered logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622. He also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.