Thomas Archer Hirst
Thomas Archer Hirst FRS (22 April 1830 – 16 February 1892) was a 19th-century English mathematician, specialising in geometry. He was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1883.
Life
Thomas Hirst was born in
In his late teens, at the instigation of Tyndall, Hirst decided to go to Germany for education, initially in
From 1860 to 1864, Hirst taught at University College School, but resigned because he wanted more time for his mathematical research. He was appointed Professor of Physics at University College London in 1865, and he succeeded Augustus De Morgan to the Chair of Mathematics at UCL in 1867. In 1873 he was appointed as the first Director of Studies at the new Royal Naval College, Greenwich. He retired from that post in 1882, to be succeeded by William Davidson Niven.
From the 1860s onwards, Hirst also allocated much of his time in England to the administrative committees of British science. He was an active member of the governing councils of the
Vestiges
In his early days, Hirst wrote extensively in his notebooks (sometimes called the Journal), recording everything he read and much of what he was thinking about. This extraordinary record of about fifty years is preserved in the library of the
"Almost no-one reads like this anymore. It is the reading practice of a self-improving
Natural Theology and John Arthur Phillips' Geology of Yorkshire..."[5]
Both Hirst and Tyndall left in their journals and letters evidence that Vestiges (especially its geological evidence) made a good case against the story of Genesis and the case for divine intervention; yet they were not atheists. They simply came to the conclusion that parts of the Old Testament were allegorical.
Mathematics
Hirst was a projective geometer in the style of Poncelet and Steiner. He was not an adherent of the algebraic geometry approach of Cayley and Sylvester, despite being a friend of theirs. His speciality was Cremona transformations.
Notes
- ^ "Hirst biography". Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 21 February 2016.
- ^ H J Gardner and R J Wilson, Thomas Archer Hirst – Mathematician Xtravagant I. A Yorkshire surveyor, Amer. Math. Monthly 100 (1993), 435–441.
- ^ Brock W. H. and MacLeod R. M. 1974. The life and journals of Thomas Archer Hirst. Historia Mathematica 1, 181–3.
- ^ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1901). . Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 426–7. ; and Proc Roy Soc 52, (1892–93) 12–18
- ^ Secord, James A. 2000. Victorian sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception and secret authorship of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago. p343 et seq.
References
- Ueber conjugirte Diameter im dreiaxigen Ellipsoid. Inaugural-Dissertation, welche mit Genehmigung der philosophischen Facultät zu Marburg zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde einreicht Thomas Archer Hirst aus England. Marburg, Druck und Papier von Joh. Aug. Koch. 1852. [20 pages].