James Joseph Sylvester (September 3, 1814
London – March 15, 1897
Oxford) was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory,
invariant theory, number theory,
partition theory and combinatorics. He
played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was professor at Oxford.
Biography
Sylvester was born "James Joseph" but adopted the surname "Sylvester" when his older brother did so. His brother was
emigrating to the United States, a country which at that time required all immigrants to
have a given name, a middle name, and a surname. At the age of 14, Sylvester started attending the University of London, where he was a student of Augustus De
Morgan. He was soon expelled however, for stealing a knife from the refectory, with the
purpose of attacking a fellow student. Following this, he attended the Royal
Institution in Liverpool. Though he excelled academically, Sylvester was tormented by
his fellow students on account of his Jewish origins. Because of the abuse he received, he ran away, taking a boat to
Dublin. While there, he was recognized on the street by Richard
Keatinge who was Judge of the Prerogative Court of Ireland, and whose wife was a cousin of Sylvester. Keatinge arranged
for the boy's return to Liverpool.
Sylvester began his study of mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge in 1831. His studies were interrupted for almost two years due to a prolonged illness. He was ranked second in
Cambridge's famous mathematical examinations, the tripos, which he eventually sat in 1837. Yet he
did not obtain a degree, because graduates at that time were required to state their acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, and
Sylvester declined to do so. For the same reason, he was unable to compete for a Smith's
prize. In 1838 Sylvester became professor of natural philosophy at University College London UCL. In 1841, he was awarded a BA and an MA by Trinity College, Dublin. In the same year he moved to the United States to become a professor at
the University of Virginia but soon returned to England.
On his return to England he studied law, alongside fellow British lawyer/mathematician Arthur
Cayley, with whom he made significant contributions to matrix theory while working
as an actuary. One of his private pupils was Florence
Nightingale. 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,
Latin and Greek, and many of his mathematical papers contain illustrative quotes from classical poetry. In 1870, following his
early retirement, Sylvester published a book entitled The Laws of Verse in which he
attempted to codify a set of laws for prosody in poetry.
In 1877 Sylvester again crossed the Atlantic Ocean to
become the inaugural professor of mathematics at the new Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, Maryland. His salary was $5,000 (quite generous for
the time), which he demanded be paid in gold. In 1878 he founded the
American Journal of Mathematics. The only other mathematical
journal in the U.S. at that time was the Analyst, which eventually became the
Annals of Mathematics.
In 1883, he returned to England to take up the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford
University. He held this chair until his death, although in 1892 the University appointed a
deputy professor to the same chair.
Sylvester invented a great number of mathematical terms such as discriminant. He has
given a name to Euler's totient function φ(n). His collected scientific
work fills four volumes. In 1880, the Royal Society of
London awarded Sylvester the Copley Medal, its highest award for scientific
achievement; in 1901, it instituted the Sylvester Medal in
his memory, to encourage mathematical research.
Sylvester House, a portion of an undergraduate dormitory at Johns Hopkins,
is named in his honor.
Bibliography
Primary:
- 1904-10. Collected Mathematical Papers in 4 vols. Edited by H. F. Baker. New York. (PDF/DjVu copy of volume 1 at
Internet Archive; PDF copyof
Vols. 2-4 at University of Michigan)
- 1839. "On rational derivation from equations of coexistence, that is to say, a new and extended theory of elimination, Part
I," Philos. Mag. 15: 428-435.
- 1857. "On the partition of numbers," Quart. J. Math. I: 141-152.
- 1869. "Presidential address to Section A of the British Association" in Ewald, William B., ed., 1996. From Kant to
Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, 2 vols. Oxford Uni. Press: 511-22.
- 1897. "Outlines of seven lectures on the partition of numbers," Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 28: 33-96.
Secondary:
- Franklin, Address Commemorative of Sylvester, (Baltimore, 1897)
See also
External links
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