James Stirling was born in May, 1692 in Garden Scotland. Little is known of Stirling's early years. Evidently, he attended Balliol College at Oxford University, and perhaps the University of Glasgow as well.
His earliest published mathematical work deals with plane curves of degree 3. Stirling was a friend and collaborator with many of the most famous scientists of the time, including Newton, Euler, Macluarin, and De Moivre. Stirling's most important work was Methodus Differentialis, published in 1730. This books was a study of infinite series, interpolation, and quadrature, and contains Stirling's famous asymptotic formula for \(n!\).
In 1735, Stirling returned to Scotland to a accept a position as the manager of a mine. He continued to do important scientific work in spite of the pressures of his job, even writing a paper on the ventilation of mine shafts.