John Wallis born (23/11/1616)

English clergyman and mathematician (etc.)
A founder of the Royal Society. Lived until 1703.
His Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653, reprinted well into the next century) was written in Latin, but claimed to proceed by "a completely new method, which has its basis not, as is customary, in the structure of the Latin language but in the characteristic structure of our own".
It would be interesting to know more, but Crystal mentions only Wallis's recognition that English nouns do not have cases as in Greek and Latin.
(Wiki devotes most of its article to Wallis's mathematica work and barely mentions the grammar.)
"Wallis's observations could have been written by any modern linguist. But for 300 years his insight was ignored..." (Crystal)
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=TXFJAAAAcAAJ&newbks=0&printsec=frontcover&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_johannis-wallis-gra_wallis-john_1674