James Joseph Sylvester - Biography, Bibliography

Mathematician, born in London, UK. He studied at Cambridge but, as a Jew, was disqualified from graduating. He became professor at University College London (1837), and the University of Virginia (1841–5). Returning to London he worked as an actuary, and was called to the bar in 1850. He then took up academic life again, becoming professor of mathematics at Woolwich (1855–70), at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (1877–83), and at Oxford (1883–94). He made important contributions to the theory of invariants and to number theory.

James Joseph Sylvester (September 3, 1814 London – March 15, 1897 Oxford) was an English mathematician. 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.

Biography

Sylvester was born "James Joseph" but adopted the surname "Sylvester" when his older brother did so. At the age of 14, Sylvester started attending the University of London, where he was a student of Augustus De Morgan. Though he excelled academically, Sylvester was tormented by his fellow students on account of his Jewish origins. While there, he was recognised on the street by Richard Keatinge who was Judge of the Prerogative Court of Ireland, and whose wife was a cousin of Sylvester.

Sylvester began his study of mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge in 1831. 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. In 1838 Sylvester became professor of natural philosophy at University College London UCL. 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. He did not obtain a position teaching university mathematics until 1855, when he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at 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; 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. 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.

Sylvester invented a great number of mathematical terms such as discriminant. 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, an undergraduate dormitory at Johns Hopkins, is named in his honor.

Bibliography

Primary:

1904-10.