James Joseph Sylvester
James Joseph Sylvester | |
---|---|
St. John's College, Cambridge | |
Known for |
|
Awards | Royal Medal (1861) Copley Medal (1880) De Morgan Medal (1887) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Johns Hopkins University University College London University of Virginia Royal Military Academy, Woolwich University of Oxford |
Academic advisors | John Hymers Augustus De Morgan |
Doctoral students | William Durfee George B. Halsted Washington Irving Stringham |
Other notable students | Isaac Todhunter William Roberts McDaniel Harry Fielding Reid Christine Ladd-Franklin |
James Joseph Sylvester
Biography
James Joseph was born in London on 3 September 1814, the son of Abraham Joseph, a Jewish merchant.[1] James later adopted the surname Sylvester when his older brother did so upon emigration to the United States.
At the age of 14, Sylvester was a student of Augustus De Morgan at the University of London (now University College London). His family withdrew him from the university after he was accused of stabbing a fellow student with a knife. Subsequently, he attended the Liverpool Royal Institution.
Sylvester began his study of mathematics at
On his return to England, he was hired in 1844 by the Equity and Law Life Assurance Society for which he developed successful actuarial models and served as de facto CEO, a position that required a law degree. As a result, he studied for the Bar, meeting a fellow British mathematician studying law, Arthur Cayley, with whom he made significant contributions to invariant theory and also matrix theory during a long collaboration.[5] He did not obtain a position teaching university mathematics until 1855, when he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, from which he retired in 1869, because the compulsory retirement age was 55. The Woolwich academy initially refused to pay Sylvester his full pension, and only relented after a prolonged public controversy, during which Sylvester took his case to the letters page of The Times.
One of Sylvester's lifelong passions was for poetry; he read and translated works from the original French, German, Italian,
In 1872, he finally received his B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge, having been denied the degrees due to his being a Jew.[2]
In 1876
In 1877, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.[9]
In 1878 he founded the American Journal of Mathematics. The only other mathematical journal in the US at that time was the Analyst, which eventually became the Annals of Mathematics.
In 1883, he returned to England to take up the
Sylvester died at 5 Hertford Street, London on 15 March 1897. He is buried in Balls Pond Road Cemetery on Kingsbury Road in London.[11]
Legacy
Sylvester invented a great number of mathematical terms such as "
Sylvester House, a portion of an undergraduate dormitory at Johns Hopkins University, is named in his honor. Several professorships there are named in his honor also.
Publications
- Sylvester, James Joseph (1870). The Laws of Verse, or, Principles of Versification Exemplified in Metrical Translations: Together with an Annotated Reprint of the Inaugural Presidential Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at Exeter. London: Longmans, Green and Co. ISBN 978-1-177-91141-2.
- Sylvester, James Joseph (1973) [1904]. ISBN 978-0-8218-3654-5.[18]
- Sylvester, James Joseph (1973) [1908]. Baker, Henry Frederick (ed.). The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester. Vol. II. New York: AMS Chelsea Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8218-4719-0.[18]
- Sylvester, James Joseph (1973) [1904]. Baker, Henry Frederick (ed.). The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester. Vol. III. New York: AMS Chelsea Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8218-4720-6.[19]
- Sylvester, James Joseph (1973) [1904]. Baker, Henry Frederick (ed.). The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester. Vol. IV. New York: AMS Chelsea Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8218-4238-6.
See also
- Catalecticant
- Clock and shift matrices
- Covariance and contravariance of vectors
- Evectant
- Inclusion–exclusion principle
- Invariant of a binary form
- Sylvester's construction
- Sylvester pentahedron
- Sylvester's problem
- Umbral calculus
- List of things named after James Joseph Sylvester
References
- ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original(PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2018.
- ^ a b "Sylvester, James Joseph (SLVR831JJ)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ^ Bell, Eric Temple (1986). Men of Mathematics. Simon Schuster.
- ^ Biography of Sylvester, MacTutor, University of St. Andrews, accessed 6 October 2021
- MR 2216541.
- ^ Sylvester, J. J. (1870). The Laws of Verse, or, Principles of Versification Exemplified in Metrical Translations. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
- ^ "Preliminary Outline of Instructions for the Session Beginning October 3, 1876". Johns Hopkins University. Official Circulars (5). September 1876.
- ^ Hawkins, Hugh (1960). Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874-1889. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 41–43.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 10 May 2021.
- ^ "School Notes" (PDF). The Abingdonian.
- ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original(PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2018.
- ^ Matrices and determinants, The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
- ^ See:
- J. J. Sylvester (7 February 1878) "Chemistry and algebra," Nature, 17 : 284. From page 284: "Every invariant and covariant thus becomes expressible by a graph precisely identical with a Kekuléan diagram or chemicograph."
- J. J. Sylvester (1878) "On an application of the new atomic theory to the graphical representation of the invariants and covariants of binary quantics, — with three appendices," American Journal of Mathematics, Pure and Applied, 1 (1) : 64-90. The term "graph" first appears in this paper on page 65.
- ^ J. J. Sylvester (1851) "On a remarkable discovery in the theory of canonical forms and of hyperdeterminants," Philosophical Magazine, 4th series, 2 : 391–410; Sylvester coined the term "discriminant" on page 406.
- ^ J. J. Sylvester (1879) "On certain ternary cubic-form equations," American Journal of Mathematics, 2 : 357–393; Sylvester coins the term "totient" on page 361: "(the so-called Φ function of any number I shall here and hereafter designate as its τ function and call its Totient)"
- ^ Sylvester, James Joseph (1851). "On the relation between the minor determinants of linearly equivalent quadratic functions". Philosophical Magazine. 1: 295–305.
- ^ C.G.J. Jacobi, "De Formatione et Proprietatibus Determinantium", Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 22, 285-318 (1841)
- ^ .
- .
Sources
- Grattan-Guinness, I. (2001), "The contributions of J. J. Sylvester, F.R.S., to mechanics and mathematical physics", Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 55 (2): 253–265, S2CID 122748202.
- Macfarlane, Alexander (2009) [1916], Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century, Mathematical monographs, vol. 17, Cornell University Library, ISBN 978-1-112-28306-2
- Parshall, Karen Hunger (2006), James Joseph Sylvester. Jewish mathematician in a Victorian world, Johns Hopkins University Press, MR 2216541
External links
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James Joseph Sylvester", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- James Joseph Sylvester at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Collected papers – from the University of Michigan Historical Math Collection
- J. J. Sylvester home page
- Selected Poetry of James Joseph Sylvester
- Works by James Joseph Sylvester at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)