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Andrew Forsyth
19th and 20th-century British mathematician From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Andrew Russell Forsyth, FRS,[1] FRSE (18 June 1858, Glasgow – 2 June 1942, South Kensington) was a British mathematician.[2][3]
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Life
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Forsyth was born in Glasgow on 18 June 1858, the son of John Forsyth, a marine engineer, and his wife Christina Glen.[4]
Forsyth studied at Liverpool College and was tutored by Richard Pendlebury before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating senior wrangler in 1881.[5] He was elected a fellow of Trinity and then appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Liverpool at the age of 24. He returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1884 and became Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1895.[6] He was elected President of the Mathematical Association for 1903.[7]
Forsyth was forced to resign his chair in 1910 as a result of a scandal caused by his affair with Marion Amelia Boys, née Pollock, the wife of physicist C. V. Boys. Boys was granted a divorce on the grounds of Marion's adultery with Forsyth. Marion and Andrew Forsyth were later married.[8]
Forsyth became professor at the Imperial College of Science in 1913 and retired in 1923, remaining mathematically active into his seventies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886[1] and won its Royal Medal in 1897. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1908 at Rome.[9]
He is now remembered much more as an author of treatises than as an original researcher. His books have, however, often been criticized (for example by J. E. Littlewood, in his A Mathematician's Miscellany).[10] E. T. Whittaker was his only official student.[3]
He died in London on 2 June 1942 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.[4]
Forsyth received the degree of Doctor mathematicae (honoris causa) from the Royal Frederick University on 6 September 1902, when they celebrated the centennial of the birth of mathematician Niels Henrik Abel.[11][12]
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Family
Forsyth married Marion Amelia Pollock in 1910.[1]
Works
- A Treatise on Differential Equations (1885)
- translated into German as Lehrbuch der Differentialgleichungen (1912)[13]
- Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable (1893)[14]
- Geodesics on an oblate spheroid(1895–96)
- Theory of Differential Equations (1890–1906) six volumes[15]
- Lectures on the Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces (1912)
- Lectures Introductory to the Theory of Functions of Two Complex Variables(1914)[16]
- Solutions of the Examples in a Treatise on Differential Equations (1918)[17]
- Calculus of Variations (1927)[18][19]
- Geometry of Four Dimensions (1930)[20]
- Intrinsic Geometry of Ideal Space (1935)[21] vol. 1 vol. 2
See also
References
External links
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