Famous Mathematicians from England
- Abraham Manie "Abe" Adelstein (28 March 1916 – 18 October 1992) was a South African born doctor who became the United Kingdom's Chief Medical Statistician.
- Birthplace: South Africa
- Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is sometimes regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a "computing machine" and one of the first computer programmers.Lovelace was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and his wife Lady Byron. All of Byron's other children were born out of wedlock to other women. Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever four months later. He commemorated the parting in a poem that begins, "Is thy face like thy mother's my fair child! ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart?". He died of disease in the Greek War of Independence when Ada was eight years old. Her mother remained bitter and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Ada remained interested in Byron. Upon her eventual death, she was buried next to him at her request. Although often ill in her childhood, Ada pursued her studies assiduously. She married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby becoming Countess of Lovelace. Her educational and social exploits brought her into contact with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and the author Charles Dickens, contacts which she used to further her education. Ada described her approach as "poetical science" and herself as an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)".When she was a teenager, her mathematical talents led her to a long working relationship and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, who is known as "the father of computers". She was in particular interested in Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine. Lovelace first met him in June 1833, through their mutual friend, and her private tutor, Mary Somerville. Between 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an article by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea on the calculating engine, supplementing it with an elaborate set of notes, simply called Notes. These notes contain what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Other historians reject this perspective and point out that Babbage's personal notes from the years 1836/1837 contain the first programs for the engine. Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers. She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities. Her mindset of "poetical science" led her to ask questions about the Analytical Engine (as shown in her notes) examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool.She died of uterine cancer in 1852 at the age of 36.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Adelard of Bath (Latin: Adelardus Bathensis; c. 1080 – c. 1152 AD) was a 12th-century English natural philosopher. He is known both for his original works and for translating many important Arabic and Greek scientific works of astrology, astronomy, philosophy and mathematics into Latin from Arabic versions, which were then introduced to Western Europe. He is known as one of the first to introduce the Arabic numeral system to Europe. He stands at the convergence of three intellectual schools: the traditional learning of French schools, the Greek culture of Southern Italy, and the Arabic science of the East.
- Birthplace: Bath, United Kingdom
Albert Ingham
Dec. at 67 (1900-1967)Albert Edward Ingham FRS (3 April 1900 – 6 September 1967) was an English mathematician.- Birthplace: Northampton, United Kingdom
Alfred Kempe
Dec. at 72 (1849-1922)Sir Alfred Bray Kempe DCL FRS (6 July 1849, Kensington, London – 21 April 1922, London) was a mathematician best known for his work on linkages and the four colour theorem. Kempe was the son of the Rector of St James's Church, Piccadilly, the Rev. John Edward Kempe. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge where Arthur Cayley was one of his teachers. He graduated BA (22nd wrangler) in 1872. Despite his interest in mathematics he became a barrister, specialising in the ecclesiastical law. He was knighted in 1913, the same year he became the Chancellor for the Diocese of London. He was also Chancellor of the dioceses of Newcastle, Southwell, St Albans, Peterborough, Chichester, and Chelmsford. He received the honorary degree DCL from the University of Durham and he was elected a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1909. In 1876 he published his article On a General Method of describing Plane Curves of the nth degree by Linkwork, which showed that for an arbitrary algebraic plane curve a linkage can be constructed that draws the curve. This direct connection between linkages and algebraic curves was recently named the Kempe's Universality Theorem that any bounded subset of an algebraic curve may be traced out by the motion of one of the joints in a suitably chosen linkage. Kempe's proof was flawed, and the first complete proof was provided in 2002, based on his ideas.In 1877 Kempe discovered new straight line linkages and published his influential lectures on the subject. In 1879 Kempe wrote his famous "proof" of the four colour theorem, shown incorrect by Percy Heawood in 1890. Much later, his work led to fundamental concepts such as the Kempe chain and unavoidable sets. Kempe (1886) revealed a rather marked philosophical bent, and much influenced Charles Sanders Peirce. Kempe also discovered what are now called multisets, although this fact was not noted until long after his death.Kempe was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1881. He was Treasurer and Vice-President of the Royal Society 1899–1919. He was a president of the London Mathematical Society from 1892 to 1894. He was also a mountain climber, mostly in Switzerland. His first wife was Mary, daughter of Sir William Bowman, 1st Baronet; she died in 1893. He then married, in 1897, Ida, daughter of His Honour Judge Meadows White, QC. He had two sons and one daughter.- Birthplace: Kensington, London, United Kingdom
- Arthur Cayley (; 16 August 1821 – 26 January 1895) was a prolific British mathematician who worked mostly on algebra. He helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics. As a child, Cayley enjoyed solving complex maths problems for amusement. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in Greek, French, German, and Italian, as well as mathematics. He worked as a lawyer for 14 years. He postulated the Cayley–Hamilton theorem—that every square matrix is a root of its own characteristic polynomial, and verified it for matrices of order 2 and 3. He was the first to define the concept of a group in the modern way—as a set with a binary operation satisfying certain laws. Formerly, when mathematicians spoke of "groups", they had meant permutation groups. Cayley tables and Cayley graphs as well as Cayley's theorem are named in honour of Cayley.
- Birthplace: Richmond, London, London, United Kingdom
- Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster FRS FRSE (12 September 1851 – 17 October 1934) was a German-born British physicist known for his work in spectroscopy, electrochemistry, optics, X-radiography and the application of harmonic analysis to physics. Schuster's integral is named after him. He contributed to making the University of Manchester a centre for the study of physics.
- Birthplace: Frankfurt, Germany
- Augustus Edward Hough Love FRS (17 April 1863, Weston-super-Mare – 5 June 1940, Oxford), often known as A. E. H. Love, was a mathematician famous for his work on the mathematical theory of elasticity. He also worked on wave propagation and his work on the structure of the Earth in Some Problems of Geodynamics won for him the Adams prize in 1911 when he developed a mathematical model of surface waves known as Love waves. Love also contributed to the theory of tidal locking and introduced the parameters known as Love numbers, which are widely used today. These numbers are also used in problems related to the tidal deformation of the Earth due to the gravitational attraction of the Moon and Sun. He was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School and in 1881 won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, where he was at first undecided whether to study classics or mathematics. His successful progress (he was placed Second Wrangler) vindicated his choice of mathematics, and in 1886 he was elected Fellow of the college. In 1899 he was appointed Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Oxford, a position which he retained until his death in 1940. He was also a Fellow of Queen's College. He authored the two volume classic, A Treatise on the Mathematical Theory of Elasticity.. He was the author of several articles in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, including Elasticity and Infinitesimal Calculus His other awards include the Royal Society Royal Medal in 1909 and Sylvester Medal in 1937, the London Mathematical Society De Morgan Medal in 1926. He was secretary to the London Mathematical Society between 1895 and 1910, and president for 1912–1913.
- Birthplace: Weston-super-Mare, United Kingdom
- Benjamin Gompertz (5 March 1779 – 14 July 1865) was a British self-educated mathematician and actuary, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Gompertz is now best known for his Gompertz law of mortality, a demographic model published in 1825.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Brook Taylor (18 August 1685 – 29 December 1731) was an English mathematician who is best known for Taylor's theorem and the Taylor series.
- Birthplace: Edmonton, Canada
C. V. Durell
Dec. at 86 (1882-1968)Clement Vavasor Durell (born 6 June 1882, Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire, died South Africa, 10 December 1968) was an English schoolmaster who wrote mathematical textbooks.- Birthplace: Fulbourn, United Kingdom
- Charles Hutton FRS FRSE LLD (14 August 1737 – 27 January 1823) was an English mathematician and surveyor. He was professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich from 1773 to 1807. He is remembered for his calculation of the density of the earth from Nevil Maskelyne's measurements collected during the Schiehallion experiment.
- Birthplace: Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
- Charles James Hargreave (December 1820 – 23 April 1866) was an English judge and mathematician.
- Sir Christopher Michael Wren PRS is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history. He was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710. The principal creative responsibility for a number of the churches is now more commonly attributed to others in his office, especially Nicholas Hawksmoor. Other notable buildings by Wren include the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and the south front of Hampton Court Palace. The Wren Building, the main building at the College of William and Mary, is attributed to Wren. It is the oldest academic building in continuous use in the United States. Educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics at the University of Oxford, Wren was a notable anatomist, astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-physicist, as well as an architect. He was a founder of the Royal Society, and his scientific work was highly regarded by Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal.
- Birthplace: East Knoyle, United Kingdom
Daniel Cresswell
Dec. at 68 (1776-1844)Daniel Cresswell D.D. (1776 – 21 Mar 1844),was a British clergyman and mathematician. He was son of Daniel Cresswell, a native of Crowden-le-Booth, in Edale, Derbyshire, who lived for many years at Newton, near Wakefield, Yorkshire. He was born at Wakefield in 1776 and educated in the grammar school there and at Hull. He proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow (B.A. 1797, M.A. 1800, D.D. per literas regia, 1823). At the university, where he resided many years, he took private pupils. In December 1822 he was presented to the vicarage of Enfield, one of the most valuable livings in the gift of his college, and in the following year he was appointed a justice of the peace for Middlesex and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died at Enfield on 21 March 1844.- Birthplace: Wakefield, United Kingdom
- David George Kendall FRS (15 January 1918 – 23 October 2007) was an English statistician and mathematician, known for his work on probability, statistical shape analysis, ley lines and queueing theory. He spent most of his academic life in the University of Oxford (1946–1962) and the University of Cambridge (1962–1985). He worked with M. S. Bartlett during World War II, and visited Princeton University after the war.
- Birthplace: Ripon, United Kingdom
- David Sharp (15 February 1972 – 15 May 2006) was an English mountaineer who died near the summit of Mount Everest. His death caused controversy and debate, because he was passed by a number of other climbers heading to and returning from the summit as he was dying, although a number of others did try to help him.Sharp had previously summitted Cho Oyu and was noted as being a talented rock climber, who seemed to acclimatize well, and was known for being in good humor around mountaineering camps. He had appeared briefly in season one of the television show Everest: Beyond the Limit, which was filmed the same season as his ill-fated expedition to Everest.He had a degree from the University of Nottingham and pursued climbing as a hobby. He had worked for an engineering firm and took time off to go on adventures and climbing expeditions, but had been planning to start work as a school teacher in the autumn of 2006.
- Birthplace: England
- Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE (born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Edmond (or Edmund) Halley, FRS (; 8 November [O.S. 29 October] 1656 – 25 January 1742 [O.S. 14 January 1741]) was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720.From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena, Halley recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realised a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the size of the Solar System. He also used his observations to expand contemporary star maps. He aided in observationally proving Isaac Newton's laws of motion, and funded the publication of Newton's influential Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. From his September 1682 observations, he used the laws of motion to compute the periodicity of Halley's Comet in his 1705 Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets. It was named after him upon its predicted return in 1758, which he did not live to see. Beginning in 1698, he made sailing expeditions and made observations on the conditions of terrestrial magnetism. In 1718, he discovered the proper motion of the "fixed" stars.
- Birthplace: Haggerston, London, United Kingdom
- Sir Edward Foyle Collingwood LLD (17 January 1900 – 25 October 1970) was an English mathematician and scientist. He was a member of the Eglingham branch of a prominent Northumbrian family, the son of Col. Cuthbert Collingwood of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose family seat was at Lilburn Tower, near Wooler, Northumberland. His great grandfather was a brother of Admiral Lord Collingwood.
- Birthplace: Lilburn Tower, United Kingdom
Edward Wright
Edward Wright (baptised 8 October 1561; died November 1615) was an English mathematician and cartographer noted for his book Certaine Errors in Navigation (1599; 2nd ed., 1610), which for the first time explained the mathematical basis of the Mercator projection, and set out a reference table giving the linear scale multiplication factor as a function of latitude, calculated for each minute of arc up to a latitude of 75°. This was in fact a table of values of the integral of the secant function, and was the essential step needed to make practical both the making and the navigational use of Mercator charts. Wright was born at Garveston and educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow from 1587 to 1596. In 1589 the College granted him leave after Elizabeth I requested that he carry out navigational studies with a raiding expedition organised by the Earl of Cumberland to the Azores to capture Spanish galleons. The expedition's route was the subject of the first map to be prepared according to Wright's projection, which was published in Certaine Errors in 1599. The same year, Wright created and published the first world map produced in England and the first to use the Mercator projection since Gerardus Mercator's original 1569 map. Not long after 1600 Wright was appointed as surveyor to the New River project, which successfully directed the course of a new man-made channel to bring clean water from Ware, Hertfordshire, to Islington, London. Around this time, Wright also lectured mathematics to merchant seamen, and from 1608 or 1609 was mathematics tutor to the son of James I, the heir apparent Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, until the latter's very early death at the age of 18 in 1612. A skilled designer of mathematical instruments, Wright made models of an astrolabe and a pantograph, and a type of armillary sphere for Prince Henry. In the 1610 edition of Certaine Errors he described inventions such as the "sea-ring" that enabled mariners to determine the magnetic variation of the compass, the sun's altitude and the time of day in any place if the latitude was known; and a device for finding latitude when one was not on the meridian using the height of the pole star. Apart from a number of other books and pamphlets, Wright translated John Napier's pioneering 1614 work which introduced the idea of logarithms from Latin into English. This was published after Wright's death as A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithmes (1616). Wright's work influenced, among other persons, Dutch astronomer and mathematician Willebrord Snellius; Adriaan Metius, the geometer and astronomer from Holland; and the English mathematician Richard Norwood, who calculated the length of a degree on a great circle of the earth using a method proposed by Wright.- Birthplace: Garvestone, United Kingdom
Emery Molyneux
Emery Molyneux ( EM-ər-ee MOL-in-oh; died June 1598) was an English Elizabethan maker of globes, mathematical instruments and ordnance. His terrestrial and celestial globes, first published in 1592, were the first to be made in England and the first to be made by an Englishman. Molyneux was known as a mathematician and maker of mathematical instruments such as compasses and hourglasses. He became acquainted with many prominent men of the day, including the writer Richard Hakluyt and the mathematicians Robert Hues and Edward Wright. He also knew the explorers Thomas Cavendish, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and John Davis. Davis probably introduced Molyneux to his own patron, the London merchant William Sanderson, who largely financed the construction of the globes. When completed, the globes were presented to Elizabeth I. Larger globes were acquired by royalty, noblemen and academic institutions, while smaller ones were purchased as practical navigation aids for sailors and students. The globes were the first to be made in such a way that they were unaffected by the humidity at sea, and they came into general use on ships. Molyneux emigrated to Amsterdam with his wife in 1596 or 1597. He succeeded in interesting the States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, in a cannon he had invented, but he died suddenly in June 1598, apparently in poverty. The globe-making industry in England died with him. Only six of his globes are believed still to be in existence. Three are in England, of which one pair consisting of a terrestrial and a celestial globe is owned by Middle Temple and displayed in its library, while a terrestrial globe is at Petworth House in Petworth, West Sussex.- Birthplace: England
Christopher Zeeman
Age: 99Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman FRS (4 February 1925 – 13 February 2016), was a British mathematician, known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory.- Birthplace: Japan
- Ernest William Barnes (1 April 1874 – 29 November 1953) was an English mathematician and scientist who later became a liberal theologian and bishop.He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Master of the Temple from 1915 to 1919. He was made Bishop of Birmingham in 1924, the only bishop appointed during Ramsay MacDonald's first term in office. His modernist views, in particular objection to Reservation, led to conflict with the Anglo-Catholics in his diocese. A biography by his son, Sir John Barnes, Ahead of His Age: Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, was published in 1979.
- Birthplace: Birmingham, United Kingdom
- Ernest William Brown FRS (29 November 1866 – 22 July 1938) was an English mathematician and astronomer, who spent the majority of his career working in the United States and became a naturalised American citizen in 1923.His life's work was the study of the Moon's motion (lunar theory) and the compilation of extremely accurate lunar tables. He also studied the motion of the planets and calculated the orbits of Trojan asteroids.
- Birthplace: Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom
- Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, (born 1959) is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry.
- Birthplace: United Kingdom
Francis Williams
Dec. at 68 (1702-1770)Francis Williams may refer to: Francis Williams (headmaster) (1830–1895) Anglican priest and headmaster in South Australia Francis Williams (musician) (1910–1983), American jazz trumpeter Francis Williams (poet) (1702–1770), scholar and poet born in Kingston, Jamaica Francis Xavier Williams (1882–1967), American entomologist Francis Cromwell alias Williams, MP for Huntingdonshire Francis Williams, Baron Francis-Williams (1903–1970), British newspaper editor and public relations advisor to British prime minister Clement Attlee- Birthplace: Jamaica
George Ballard Mathews
Dec. at 61 (1861-1922)George Ballard Mathews, FRS (23 February 1861 — 19 March 1922) was an English mathematician. He was born in London. He studied at the Ludlow Grammar School which had instruction in Hebrew and Sanscrit as well as in Greek and Latin. He proceeded to University College, London where Olaus Henrici made him "realise that mathematics is an inductive science, not a set of rules and formulae." He then took up preparation for Cambridge Mathematical Tripos under the guidance of William Henry Besant. He came out Senior Wrangler for 1883. He was elected a Fellow of St John's College.In 1884 University College of North Wales was established under Principal Harry Reichel and Mathews as professor of mathematics. He taught alongside Andrew Gray, James Johnston Dobbie and Henry Stuart Jones. There he produced his first textbook Theory of Numbers. Part I (1892), an introduction to number theory. (It is likely that the book was studied by Ramanujan before he left for England in 1914.) In 1896, discouraged at the preparation and dedication of students, Mathews resigned and moved to Cambridge. Mathews was elected to the Royal Society in 1897. He worked as University Lecturer at Cambridge University. In 1906 he resigned from Cambridge. Returning to Bangor, Wales, he again took up teaching at University College of North Wales. He produced his book Algebraic Equations in 1907. His book on projective geometry (1914) is noted for its attention to foundations and its exposition of Karl von Staudt’s approach to imaginary units. In 1915 Glasgow University bestowed an honorary L.L.D. upon him. In 1922 he and Andrew Gray published a book on Bessel's functions.Mathews was weakened by poor nutrition under the rationing due to World War I. He had surgery in 1919, a seizure in 1921, and never recovered. Describing his friend, Andrew Gray wrote that Mathews was "a classical scholar and deeply interested in philosophical questions of all kinds...His mind was keen and tongue sharp." Gray also noted that Mathews was "exceedingly sensitive, and almost morbidly afraid of appearing to put himself forward in any way, so that he hardly received the recognition that was due him." Mathews authored a large number of book reviews for the scientific journal Nature. These short essays gave him ample opportunity for expression. For example, under the title "Mathematics and Civilisation", reviewing three German monographs, he wrote, "history of culture...change of habits of thought...nothing whatever has contributed so much as the study of pure mathematics." He cites author A. Voss asserting that "mathematics is pre-eminently a creation of the spirit of man; it is his least restricted field of activity, and we are under a moral obligation to cultivate it." In a review in 1916 he predicted World War II: England's contempt for science, which all who know have been protesting for a generation, will, if not amended, bring her down in sorrow to the ground, whatever the issue of the present war, which will be followed by one of much greater intensity, for which the weapons will be forged, not by hands, or machines, but by brains.- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
George Frederick James Temple
Dec. at 90 (1901-1992)Dom George Frederick James Temple FRS OSB (born 2 September 1901, London; died 30 January 1992, Isle of Wight) was an English mathematician, recipient of the Sylvester Medal in 1969. He was President of the London Mathematical Society in the years 1951-1953.Temple took his first degree as an evening student at Birkbeck College, London, between 1918 and 1922, and also worked there as a research assistant. In 1924 he moved to Imperial College as a demonstrator, where he worked under the direction of Sydney Chapman. After a period spent with Eddington at Cambridge, he returned to Imperial as reader in mathematics. He was appointed professor of mathematics at King's College London in 1932, where he returned after war service with the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. In 1953 he was appointed Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a chair which he held until 1968, and in which he succeeded Chapman. He was also an honorary Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. After the death of his wife in 1980, Temple, a devout Christian, took monastic vows in the Benedictine order and entered Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, where he remained until his death.- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
George Peacock
Dec. at 67 (1791-1858)George Peacock FRS (9 April 1791 – 8 November 1858) was an English mathematician.- Birthplace: County Durham, United Kingdom
George Spencer-Brown
Age: 101George Spencer-Brown (2 April 1923 – 25 August 2016) was an English polymath best known as the author of Laws of Form. He described himself as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, consulting psychotherapist, author, and poet".- Birthplace: Grimsby, United Kingdom
Graham Nelson
Age: 57Graham A. Nelson (born 1968) is a British mathematician and poet and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. He has also authored several IF games, including the acclaimed Curses (1993) and Jigsaw (1995), using the experience of writing Curses in particular to expand the range of verbs that Inform is capable of understanding. He has been described by The New York Times as "ornately literate."Nelson is the author of the Inform Designer's Manual, which includes one of the first published works of interactive fiction theory, an essay titled "The Craft of Adventure". He has also written several important essays on interactive fiction in the field. He is one of a very small number of individuals (such as Andrew Plotkin) who are celebrated both for their creative and their technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene. Nelson studied at Selwyn College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a fellow in pure mathematics at St Anne's College, Oxford. He co-edited Oxford Poetry and in 1997 received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for his poetry. As of 2004 he was managing editor of Legenda, the imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA). He is married to IF writer Emily Short.H. F. Baker
Dec. at 89 (1866-1956)Henry Frederick Baker FRS FRSE (3 July 1866 – 17 March 1956) was a British mathematician, working mainly in algebraic geometry, but also remembered for contributions to partial differential equations (related to what would become known as solitons), and Lie groups.- Birthplace: Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Harold Davenport FRS (30 October 1907 – 9 June 1969) was an English mathematician, known for his extensive work in number theory.
- Birthplace: Huncoat, United Kingdom
- Henry Briggs (February 1561 – 26 January 1630) was an English mathematician notable for changing the original logarithms invented by John Napier into common (base 10) logarithms, which are sometimes known as Briggsian logarithms in his honour. Briggs was a committed puritan and an influential professor in his time.
- Birthplace: Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Henry Thomas Herbert Piaggio
Dec. at 83 (1884-1967)Henry Thomas Herbert Piaggio (2 June 1884–26 June 1967) was an English mathematician. Educated at the City of London School and St John's College Cambridge, he was appointed lecturer in mathematics at the University of Nottingham in 1908 and then the first Professor of Mathematics in 1919. He was the author of "An Elementary Treatise on Differential Equations and their Applications".-- Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton (28 April 1854 – 26 August 1923) was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, and suffragette. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.
- Birthplace: Portsea, United Kingdom
Humphry Ditton
Dec. at 40 (1675-1715)Humphry Ditton (29 May 1675 – 15 October 1715) was an English mathematician.- Birthplace: Salisbury, United Kingdom
- Ian Grant Macdonald (born 11 October 1928 in London, England) is a British mathematician known for his contributions to symmetric functions, special functions, Lie algebra theory and other aspects of algebra, algebraic combinatorics, and combinatorics. He was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1952. He then spent five years as a civil servant. He was offered a position at Manchester University in 1957 by Max Newman, on the basis of work he had done while outside academia. In 1960 he moved to the University of Exeter, and in 1963 became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He became Fielden Professor at Manchester in 1972, and professor at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1976. He worked on symmetric products of algebraic curves, Jordan algebras and the representation theory of groups over local fields. In 1972 he proved the Macdonald identities, after a pattern known to Freeman Dyson. His 1979 book Symmetric Functions and Hall Polynomials has become a classic. Symmetric functions are an old theory, part of the theory of equations, to which both K-theory and representation theory lead. His was the first text to integrate much classical theory, such as Hall polynomials, Schur functions, the Littlewood–Richardson rule, with the abstract algebra approach. It was both an expository work and, in part, a research monograph, and had a major impact in the field. The Macdonald polynomials are now named after him. The Macdonald conjectures from 1982 also proved most influential. Macdonald was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979. In 1991 he received the Pólya Prize of the London Mathematical Society. He was awarded the 2009 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Isaac Barrow (October 1630 – 4 May 1677) was an English Christian theologian and mathematician who is generally given credit for his early role in the development of infinitesimal calculus; in particular, for the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus. His work centered on the properties of the tangent; Barrow was the first to calculate the tangents of the kappa curve. He is also notable for being the inaugural holder of the prestigious Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, a post later held by his student, Isaac Newton.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
Isaac Milner
Dec. at 70 (1750-1820)Isaac Milner (11 January 1750 – 1 April 1820) was a mathematician, an inventor, the President of Queens' College, Cambridge and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.He was instrumental in the 1785 religious conversion of William Wilberforce and helped him through many trials and was a great supporter of the abolitionists' campaign against the slave trade, steeling Wilberforce with his assurance before the 1789 Parliamentary debate: If you carry this point in your whole life, that life will be better spent than in being prime minister of many years. He was also a natural philosopher and the Dean of Carlisle.- Birthplace: Mabgate, United Kingdom
- Isaac Todhunter FRS (23 November 1820 – 1 March 1884), was an English mathematician who is best known today for the books he wrote on mathematics and its history.
- Birthplace: Rye, United Kingdom
J. A. Todd
Dec. at 86 (1908-1994)John Arthur Todd FRS (23 August 1908 – 22 December 1994) was a British geometer.- Birthplace: Liverpool, United Kingdom
- Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a British mathematician and historian. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man, which led to his regard as "one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals".Bronowski's family moved to Germany and then to England while he was a child. In England, he won a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His interests have been described as ranging "widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism". He taught mathematics at the University College Hull between 1934 and 1942. During World War II he led the field of operations research and worked to increase the effectiveness of Allied bombing. After the war he headed the projects division of UNESCO. Bronowski wrote poetry and had a deep affinity with William Blake. From 1950 to 1963 he worked for the National Coal Board in England. From 1963 he was a resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, until his death in 1974 in East Hampton, New York, just a year after the airing of his Ascent of Man.
- Birthplace: Łódź, Poland
- Sir James Hopwood Jeans (11 September 1877 – 16 September 1946) was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician.
- Birthplace: Ormskirk, United Kingdom
- James Joseph Sylvester FRS HFRSE LLD (3 September 1814 – 15 March 1897) 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 a professor at Oxford.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- James Jurin FRS FRCP (baptised 15 December 1684 – 29 March 1750) was an English scientist and physician, particularly remembered for his early work in capillary action and in the epidemiology of smallpox vaccination. He was a staunch proponent of the work of Sir Isaac Newton and often used his gift for satire in Newton's defence.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
James Lighthill
Dec. at 74 (1924-1998)Sir Michael James Lighthill, (23 January 1924 – 17 July 1998) was a British applied mathematician, known for his pioneering work in the field of aeroacoustics.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- John Couch Adams (; 5 June 1819 – 21 January 1892) was a British mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, and died in Cambridge. He predicted the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to each other, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would send his coordinates to Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, who confirmed the existence of the planet on 23 September 1846, finding it within 1° of Le Verrier's predicted location. Adams was Lowndean Professor in the University of Cambridge from 1859 until his death. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866. In 1884, he attended the International Meridian Conference as a delegate for Britain. A crater on the Moon is jointly named after him, Walter Sydney Adams and Charles Hitchcock Adams. Neptune's outermost known ring and the asteroid 1996 Adams are also named after him. The Adams Prize, presented by the University of Cambridge, commemorates his prediction of the position of Neptune. His personal library is held at Cambridge University Library.
- Birthplace: Laneast, United Kingdom
- John Dee (13 July 1527 – 1608 or 1609) was an English/Welsh mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and occult philosopher, and an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He spent much time studying alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. He also advocated turning England's imperial expansion into a "British Empire", a term he is generally credited with coining. To 21st-century eyes, Dee's activities straddle the worlds of magic and modern science, but the distinction would have meant nothing to him. He was invited to lecture on Euclidean geometry at the University of Paris while still in his early twenties. He was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a respected astronomer and a leading expert in navigation, having trained many who would conduct England's voyages of discovery. Meanwhile Dee immersed himself in sorcery, astrology and Hermetic philosophy. Much effort in the last 30 years of his life was spent trying to commune with angels so as to learn the universal language of creation and bring about a pre-apocalyptic unity of mankind. A student of the Renaissance Neo-Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, he drew no distinctions between his mathematical research and his investigations of hermetic magic, angel summoning and divination: all his activities were different facets of the quest for a transcendent understanding of the divine forms underlying the visible world, Dee's "pure verities". He amassed one of the largest libraries in England. His high scholarly status also took him into Elizabethan politics, as an adviser and tutor to Elizabeth I and through relations with her ministers Francis Walsingham and William Cecil. He tutored and had patronage relations with Sir Philip Sidney, his uncle Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, Edward Dyer, and Sir Christopher Hatton.
- Birthplace: Tower, United Kingdom
- John Dunstaple (or Dunstable, c. 1390 – 24 December 1453) was an English composer of polyphonic music of the late medieval era and early Renaissance periods. He was one of the most famous composers active in the early 15th century, a near-contemporary of Leonel Power, and was widely influential, not only in England but on the continent, especially in the developing style of the Burgundian School. The spelling "Dunstaple" is preferred by Margaret Bent, since it occurs in more than twice as many musical attributions as that of "Dunstable". The few English musical sources are equally divided between "b" and "p"; however, the contemporary non-musical sources, including those with a claim to a direct association with the composer, spell his name with a "p." Both spellings remain in common usage.
- Birthplace: England
- John Fletcher Moulton, Baron Moulton (18 November 1844 – 9 March 1921) was an English mathematician, barrister and judge. He was a Cambridge Apostle.
- Birthplace: Madeley, England
- Anthony John Fox (born 25 April 1946) is a British statistician, who has worked in both the public service and academia. He was born on 25 April 1946, the son of Fred Frank Fox OBE. He was educated at Dauntsey's School, University College London (BSc) and Imperial College London (PhD). He was a statistician at the Employment Medical Advisory Service, 1970-5 and then the Medical Statistics Division of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) until 1979. In the latter job, he helped to set up the England and Wales Longitudinal Survey, which monitors the health, address changes and fertility of a 1% sample of the population of England and Wales over time for statistical purposes. During 1980-8, he was Professor of Social Statistics at City University, building up his department into one of the world's leading centres for social statistics. He returned to OPCS in 1988 as the United Kingdom Chief Medical Statistician. In 1990, he took on the additional post of honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1996, following the creation of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) (into which OPCS was incorporated), cuts in the senior Civil Service meant that his responsibilities were widened to include demographic statistics and he became Director of the Census, Population and Health Group there. In 1999, he moved to the Department of Health as Director of Statistics. Due to further cuts in senior statistical posts in the Civil Service, he soon became the most senior government statistician outside the ONS. In 2004, he became the "Change Manager" responsible for setting up the new English Information Centre for Health and Social Care (since renamed the Health and Social Care Information Centre), which officially came into existence on 1 April 2005. This centre was an NHS special health authority, so he and his staff were part of the NHS. He was the Director of Customer and Stakeholder Engagement. The permanent Chief Executive from July 2005 is Professor Denise Lievesley, formerly director of Statistics at UNESCO. John has published several books on mortality and health statistics.
- John Hadley (16 April 1682 – 14 February 1744) was an English mathematician, and laid claim to the invention of the octant, two years after Thomas Godfrey claimed the same.
- Birthplace: Bloomsbury, London, England
- Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet (; 7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, experimental photographer who invented the blueprint, and did botanical work.Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colour blindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays; his Preliminary Discourse (1831), which advocated an inductive approach to scientific experiment and theory building, was an important contribution to the philosophy of science.
- Birthplace: Slough, England
- John Holwell (24 November 1649 – 1686?) was an English astrologer and mathematician.
- Birthplace: England
John Horton Conway
Age: 87John Horton Conway (born 26 December 1937) is an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics, notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Conway spent the first half of his long career at the University of Cambridge, in England, and the second half at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he now holds the title John von Neumann Professor Emeritus.- Birthplace: Liverpool, United Kingdom
John Hudson
Dec. at 70 (1773-1843)John Hudson (1773 – 31 October 1843) was an English mathematician and clergyman. He was notable for being a senior wrangler as well as the tutor of George Peacock.John Machin
Dec. at 71 (1680-1751)John Machin (bapt. c. 1686 – June 9, 1751), a professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London, is best known for developing a quickly converging series for Pi in 1706 and using it to compute Pi to 100 decimal places.- Birthplace: England
- John Maynard Smith (6 January 1920 – 19 April 2004) was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution with George R. Price, and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
John McKay
Age: 86John K. S. McKay (born 18 November 1939, Kent) is a dual British/Canadian citizen, a mathematician at Concordia University, known for his discovery of monstrous moonshine, his joint construction of some sporadic simple groups, for the Mckay conjecture in representation theory, and for the McKay correspondence relating certain finite groups to Lie groups. McKay earned his Bachelor and Diploma in 1961 and 1962 at the University of Manchester, and his Ph.D. in 1971 from the University of Edinburgh. Since 1974 he works at Concordia University, since 1979 as a professor in Computer Science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2000, and won the 2003 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize. In April 2007 a Joint Conference was organised by the Université de Montréal and Concordia University honouring four decades of the work of John McKay.John Nunn
Age: 69John Denis Martin Nunn (born 25 April 1955 in London) is an English chess grandmaster, a three-time world champion in chess problem solving, a chess writer and publisher, and a mathematician. He is one of England's strongest chess players and was formerly in the world's top ten.- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
John Pollard
Age: 84John M. Pollard (born 1941) is a British mathematician who has invented algorithms for the factorization of large numbers and for the calculation of discrete logarithms. His factorization algorithms include the rho, p − 1, and the first version of the special number field sieve, which has since been improved by others. His discrete logarithm algorithms include the rho algorithm for logarithms and the kangaroo algorithm. He received the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics.- John Venn, FRS, FSA, (4 August 1834 – 4 April 1923) was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher noted for introducing the Venn diagram, used in the fields of set theory, probability, logic, statistics, competition math, and computer science. In 1866, Venn published The Logic of Chance, a ground-breaking book which espoused the frequency theory of probability, offering that probability should be determined by how often something is forecast to occur as opposed to “educated” assumptions. Venn then further developed George Boole's theories in the 1881 work Symbolic Logic, where he highlighted what would become known as Venn diagrams.
- Birthplace: Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom
John Wallis
Dec. at 86 (1616-1703)John Wallis (; 3 December 1616 – 8 November 1703) was an English clergyman and mathematician who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is credited with introducing the symbol ∞ to represent the concept of infinity. He similarly used 1/∞ for an infinitesimal. John Wallis was a contemporary of Newton and one of the greatest intellectuals of the early renaissance of mathematics.- Birthplace: Ashford, United Kingdom
John Wilson
Dec. at 52 (1741-1793)John Wilson (6 August 1741, Applethwaite, Westmorland – 18 October 1793, Kendal, Westmorland) was an English mathematician. Wilson's theorem is named after him. Wilson attended school in Staveley, Cumbria before going up to Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1757, where he was a student of Edward Waring. He was Senior Wrangler in 1761. He was later knighted, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1782. He was Judge of Common Pleas from 1786 until his death in 1793.Jon Speelman
Age: 68Jonathan Simon Speelman (born 2 October 1956) is an English Grandmaster chess player, mathematician and chess writer.- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Sir Jonas Moore, FRS (1617–1679) was an English mathematician, surveyor, ordnance officer, and patron of astronomy. He took part in two of the most ambitious English civil engineering projects of the 17th century: draining the Great Level of the Fens and building the Mole at Tangier. In later life, his wealth and influence as Surveyor-General of the Ordnance enabled him to become a patron and driving force behind the establishment of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
- Birthplace: Lancashire, United Kingdom
Jonathan Mestel
Age: 67Andrew Jonathan Mestel (born 13 March 1957 in Cambridge, England) is Professor of Applied Mathematics at Imperial College London. He worked on magnetohydrodynamics and biological fluid dynamics. He obtained his Ph.D. with the thesis "Magnetic Levitation of Liquid Metals" at University of Cambridge. A distinguished chess player, he was the first person to be awarded chess Grandmaster titles by FIDE in both over-the-board play and problem solving. He has also represented England at contract bridge. He announced his arrival on the international chess scene by winning the World Cadet Championship in 1974 at Pont-Sainte-Maxence. The same year, he nearly won the British Chess Championship, figuring in a seven-way play-off at Clacton, but failing to clinch the title at the last hurdle. Playing in Tjentiste in 1975, he took the bronze medal at the World Junior Championship, finishing behind Valery Chekhov and Larry Christiansen. There followed a string of British Championship successes, where he took the title in 1976, 1983 and 1988. His victory at Portsmouth in 1976 was remarkable for a start of nine consecutive wins, a record for the competition.Along the way, Mestel was awarded the Grandmaster (GM) title in 1982 and became a Chess Solving Grandmaster and the World Chess Solving Champion in 1997. With fellow GM John Nunn, he is a medal-winning member of the British Chess Solving Team. Between 1976 and 1988, he was a frequent member of the English Chess Olympiad squad, winning three team medals (two silver and one bronze). In 1984, he earned an individual gold medal for an outstanding (7/9, 78%) performance on his board. Other notable results for English teams occurred in 1978 at the World Student Olympiad in Mexico and at the 1983 European Team Chess Championship in Plovdiv. Both of these events yielded gold-medal winning performances, the latter being exceptional for the highest percentage score (6/7, 85%) on any board. As a player of league chess, he has been a patron of the 4NCL since its earliest days and represented The Gambit ADs in the 2008/9 season. In international tournaments, his best early result was second equal at London 1977, with Miguel Quinteros and Michael Stean, after Vlastimil Hort. There were also good results at Esbjerg, where he won the North Sea Cup in 1979 (with Laszlo Vadasz) and finished with a share of second in 1984 (after Nigel Short, with Lars Karlsson). At Marbella in 1982, he was the co-winner of a zonal tournament, with Nunn, Stean and John van der Wiel. At Hastings, there were good results in 1977/78 (a share of fifth in a strong field) and in 1983/84, when he shared third place (after joint winners Karlsson and Jon Speelman). Aside from his academic and chess activities, he wrote the mainframe computer game Brand X with Peter Killworth, which was later rewritten for Windows and released commercially as Philosopher's Quest. Better known by his middle name, Jonathan, he is the son of the Jewish astronomer Leon Mestel and has been married since 1982 to Anna O´Donovan. They have one son, David Mestel, born February 1992.- Birthplace: Cambridge, United Kingdom
Joseph Betts
Joseph Betts was an English mathematician: he held the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford in 1765. Betts was a Fellow of University College, Oxford. He had previously sought election as Savilian Professor of Astronomy with the support of the Earl of Litchfield, the Earl of Halifax and the Earl of Bute. He thanked his patrons for that failed attempt in the dedication to an engraving of the annular solar eclipse of 1 April 1764.- Birthplace: England
- Sir Joseph John Thomson (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was an English physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, credited with the discovery and identification of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be discovered. In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles (now called electrons), which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large charge-to-mass ratio. Thomson is also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in 1913, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays (positive ions). His experiments to determine the nature of positively charged particles, with Francis William Aston, were the first use of mass spectrometry and led to the development of the mass spectrograph.Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases.
- Birthplace: Manchester, United Kingdom
Joseph Raphson
Dec. at 67 (1648-1715)Joseph Raphson (c. 1648 – c. 1715) was an English mathematician known best for the Newton–Raphson method.- Birthplace: Middlesex, United Kingdom
- Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College, London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of social Darwinism and eugenics. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol. 1 (1886-1893) & Vol. 2 (1893) following their deaths.
- Birthplace: Islington, London, United Kingdom
- Keith J. Devlin (born 16 March 1947) is a British mathematician and popular science writer. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States. He has dual American-British citizenship.
- Birthplace: Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of world-famous children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy. The poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer, and Anglican deacon. Carroll came from a family of high-church Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll always denied this.
- Birthplace: Daresbury, Widnes, United Kingdom
- Lewis Fry Richardson, FRS (11 October 1881 – 30 September 1953) was an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting, and the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them. He is also noted for his pioneering work concerning fractals and a method for solving a system of linear equations known as modified Richardson iteration.
- Birthplace: Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
- Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin DSO MC (29 November 1872 – 1 March 1951) was an Australian statistician and economist. He was an unsuccessful gold prospector, played rugby union for England, and fought in the First World War.
- Birthplace: Hobart, Australia
Mark H. A. Davis
Age: 80Mark Herbert Ainsworth Davis is Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London, working on stochastic analysis and mathematical finance,in particular in credit risk models, pricing in incomplete markets and stochastic volatility. He also acts as a consultant to Hanover Square Capital Partners, a newly founded capital markets company. From 1995 to 1999 he was Head of Research and Product Development at Tokyo-Mitsubishi International, leading a front-office group providing pricing models and risk analysis for fixed income, equity and credit-related products. He obtained his PhD in 1971 at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Pravin Varaiya. In 2002, he was awarded the Naylor Prize by the London Mathematical Society for his "contributions to stochastic analysis, stochastic control theory and mathematical finance" and delivered a lecture titled Optimal investment with randomly terminating income. He was a founding co-editor of the journal Mathematical Finance and is currently an associate editor of Quantitative Finance. He is the author of three books on stochastic analysis and optimization.Miles Reid
Age: 77Miles Anthony Reid FRS (born 30 January 1948) is a mathematician who works in algebraic geometry.- Birthplace: Hoddesdon, United Kingdom
- Oliver Heaviside FRS (; 18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925) was an English self-taught electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques for the solution of differential equations (equivalent to Laplace transforms), reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of telecommunications, mathematics, and science for years to come.
- Birthplace: Camden Town, London, United Kingdom
- Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century.Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of Dirac, "This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful".He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a member of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami, and spent the last decade of his life at Florida State University.
- Birthplace: Bristol, United Kingdom
Paul Seymour
Age: 74Paul Seymour (born July 26, 1950) is currently a professor at Princeton University; half in the department of mathematics and half in the program in applied and computational math. His research interest is in discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. He (with others) was responsible for important progress on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, linkless embeddings, graph minors and structure, the perfect graph conjecture, the Hadwiger conjecture, and claw-free graphs. Many of his recent papers are available from his website.He won a Sloan Fellowship in 1983, and the Ostrowski Prize in 2004; and (sometimes with others) won the Fulkerson Prize in 1979, 1994, 2006 and 2009, and the Pólya Prize in 1983 and 2004. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo in 2008 and one from the Technical University of Denmark in 2013.- Birthplace: England
- Peter Barlow (13 October 1776 – 1 March 1862) was an English mathematician and physicist.
- Birthplace: Norwich, United Kingdom
Peter Giblin
Age: 81Peter John Giblin is an English mathematician whose primary research involves singularity theory and its application to geometry, computer vision, and computer graphics. Giblin is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Liverpool where he has served on staff for more than 40 years. His positions at Liverpool have included Head of Department (of mathematical sciences), and Head of Division (of pure mathematics). He is the author or co–author of eight published books, some of which have been translated into Russian. The foreword for the Russian translation of his book Curves and Singularities was written by V. I. Arnold. Giblin has also authored or co–authored over a hundred peer reviewed published articles. The first of these was published in 1968.- Birthplace: Liverpool, United Kingdom
Peter Hilton
Dec. at 87 (1923-2010)Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923 – 6 November 2010) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during the Second World War.- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
Peter Swinnerton-Dyer
Age: 97Sir Henry Peter Francis Swinnerton-Dyer, 16th Baronet, (2 August 1927 – 26 December 2018) was an English mathematician specialising in number theory at University of Cambridge. As a mathematician he was best known for his part in the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture relating algebraic properties of elliptic curves to special values of L-functions, which was developed with Bryan Birch during the first half of the 1960s with the help of machine computation, and for his work on the Titan operating system.- Birthplace: Ponteland, United Kingdom
- (Alexander) Philip Dawid (born 1 February 1946) is Emeritus Professor of Statistics of the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He is a leading proponent of Bayesian statistics.
- Rev Prof Philip Kelland PRSE FRS (17 October 1808 – 8 May 1879) was an English mathematician. He was known mainly for his great influence on the development of education in Scotland.
- Birthplace: Dunster, United Kingdom
Richard Borcherds
Age: 65Richard Ewen Borcherds (; born 29 November 1959) is a British-American mathematician currently working in quantum field theory. He is known for his work in lattices, number theory, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebras, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.- Birthplace: Cape Town, South Africa
- For the Constable of Wallingford Castle, see Richard of Wallingford.Richard of Wallingford (1292–1336) was an English mathematician, astronomer, horologist, and cleric who made major contributions to astronomy and horology while serving as abbot of St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire.
- Birthplace: Wallingford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
- Robert Fludd, also known as Robertus de Fluctibus (17 January 1574 – 8 September 1637), was a prominent English Paracelsian physician with both scientific and occult interests. He is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist and Rosicrucian apologist. Fludd is best known for his compilations in occult philosophy. He had a celebrated exchange of views with Johannes Kepler concerning the scientific and hermetic approaches to knowledge.
- Birthplace: Bearsted, United Kingdom
Robert Hues
Dec. at 79 (1553-1632)Robert Hues (1553 – 24 May 1632) was an English mathematician and geographer. He attended St. Mary Hall at Oxford, and graduated in 1578. Hues became interested in geography and mathematics, and studied navigation at a school set up by Walter Raleigh. During a trip to Newfoundland, he made observations which caused him to doubt the accepted published values for variations of the compass. Between 1586 and 1588, Hues travelled with Thomas Cavendish on a circumnavigation of the globe, performing astronomical observations and taking the latitudes of places they visited. Beginning in August 1591, Hues and Cavendish again set out on another circumnavigation of the globe. During the voyage, Hues made astronomical observations in the South Atlantic, and continued his observations of the variation of the compass at various latitudes and at the Equator. Cavendish died on the journey in 1592, and Hues returned to England the following year. In 1594, Hues published his discoveries in the Latin work Tractatus de globis et eorum usu (Treatise on Globes and Their Use) which was written to explain the use of the terrestrial and celestial globes that had been made and published by Emery Molyneux in late 1592 or early 1593, and to encourage English sailors to use practical astronomical navigation. Hues' work subsequently went into at least 12 other printings in Dutch, English, French and Latin. Hues continued to have dealings with Raleigh in the 1590s, and later became a servant of Thomas Grey, 15th Baron Grey de Wilton. While Grey was imprisoned in the Tower of London for participating in the Bye Plot, Hues stayed with him. Following Grey's death in 1614, Hues attended upon Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland, when he was confined in the Tower; one source states that Hues, Thomas Harriot and Walter Warner were Northumberland's constant companions and known as his "Three Magi", although this is disputed. Hues tutored Northumberland's son Algernon Percy (who was to become the 10th Earl of Northumberland) at Oxford, and subsequently (in 1622–1623) Algernon's younger brother Henry. In later years, Hues lived in Oxford where he was a fellow of the University, and discussed mathematics and related subjects with like-minded friends. He died on 24 May 1632 in the city and was buried in Christ Church Cathedral.- Birthplace: Little Hereford, United Kingdom
- Sir Ronald Ross (13 May 1857 – 16 September 1932) was a British medical doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria, becoming the first British Nobel laureate, and the first born outside Europe. His discovery of the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of a mosquito in 1897 proved that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, and laid the foundation for the method of combating the disease. He was a polymath, writing a number of poems, published several novels, and composed songs. He was also an amateur artist and natural mathematician. He worked in the Indian Medical Service for 25 years. It was during his service that he made the groundbreaking medical discovery. After resigning from his service in India, he joined the faculty of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and continued as Professor and Chairman of Tropical Medicine of the institute for 10 years. In 1926 he became Director-in-Chief of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, which was established in honour of his works. He remained there until his death.
- Birthplace: Almora, India
Ruth Lawrence
Age: 53Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark (Hebrew: רות אלקה לורנס-נאימרק, born 2 August 1971) is a British–Israeli mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology. Outside academia, she is best known for having been a child prodigy in mathematics.- Birthplace: Brighton, United Kingdom
- Sir Samuel Morland, 1st Baronet (1625 – 30 December 1695), or Moreland, was an English academic, diplomat, spy, inventor and mathematician of the 17th century, a polymath credited with early developments in relation to computing, hydraulics and steam power.
- Birthplace: United Kingdom
- Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson (born 20 August 1957), is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds and Donaldson–Thomas theory. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London.
- Birthplace: Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Stephen Hawking was a world-renowned physicist and cosmologist known for his ground-breaking work in theoretical physics. Born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, he displayed a keen interest in science from a young age. Despite being diagnosed with a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease that gradually paralyzed him over the decades, Hawking pursued his education at both Oxford and Cambridge, earning distinctions in Natural Science and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, specializing in general relativity and cosmology. Hawking's contributions to the field of theoretical physics are countless. His work on singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation, catapulted him to global recognition. He also collaborated with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems, providing a set of conditions under which a singularity would occur in nature. He further developed a mathematical proof for black holes, and his research on quantum mechanics and thermal properties of light in the early 1970s led to his discovery that black holes could theoretically leak energy and particles into space, and eventually explode‚ an astonishing revelation in the field of astrophysics. Beyond the sphere of academia, Stephen Hawking became a household name through his best-selling books, most notably A Brief History of Time which sold over 25 million copies worldwide. Despite the progressive nature of his disease which resulted in his reliance on a speech-generating device for communication, Hawking continued to lecture, write, and inspire millions around the world until his death on March 14, 2018. In life and after, Hawking remains an indomitable figure in the realm of science, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and an embodiment of the quest for knowledge.
- Birthplace: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
- Stephen Wolfram (; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and in theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.As a businessman, he is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he worked as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. His recent work has been on knowledge-based programming, expanding and refining the programming language of Mathematica into what is now called the Wolfram Language.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Steven Haberman (born 26 June 1951) is Director and Deputy Dean in Cass Business School, Professor of Actuarial Science in its Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance and is Founding Editor of the Journal of Pension, Economics and Finance.He was educated at Ilford County High School, Trinity College, Cambridge (MA) and City University (PhD, DSc).
Sydney Goldstein
Dec. at 85 (1903-1989)Sydney Goldstein FRS (3 December 1903, Kingston upon Hull – 22 January 1989, Cambridge, MA) was a British mathematician noted for his contribution to fluid dynamics. He is described as: "... one of those who most influenced progress in fluid dynamics during the 20th century."He was especially known for his work on steady-flow laminar boundary-layer equations and on the turbulent resistance to rotation of a disk in a fluid. Goldstein was extremely knowledgeable on aerodynamics and his work had a significant impact in that area.- Birthplace: Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom
- Thomas Allen (or Alleyn) (21 December 1542 – 30 September 1632) was an English mathematician and astrologer. Highly reputed in his lifetime, he published little, but was an active private teacher of mathematics. He was also well connected in the English intellectual networks of the period.
- Birthplace: Uttoxeter, United Kingdom
- Thomas Bayes (; c. 1701 – 7 April 1761) was an English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister who is known for formulating a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem. Bayes never published what would become his most famous accomplishment; his notes were edited and published after his death by Richard Price.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Thomas Harriot (Oxford, c. 1560 – London, 2 July 1621), also spelled Harriott, Hariot or Heriot, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator who made advances within the scientific field. Thomas Harriot was recognized for his contributions in astronomy, mathematics, and navigational techniques. Harriot worked closely with John White to create advanced maps for navigation. While Harriot worked extensively on numerous papers on the subjects of astronomy, mathematics, and navigation the amount of work that was actually published was sparse. So sparse, that the only publication that has been produced by Harriot was The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. The premise of the book includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time. He is sometimes credited with the introduction of the potato to the British Isles. Harriot was the first person to make a drawing of the Moon through a telescope, on 26 July 1609, over four months before Galileo. After graduating from St Mary Hall, Oxford, Harriot travelled to the Americas, accompanying the 1585 expedition to Roanoke island funded by Sir Walter Raleigh and led by Sir Ralph Lane. Harriot was a vital member of the venture, having learned and translating the Carolina Algonquian language from two Native Americans: Wanchese and Manteo. On his return to England, he worked for the 9th Earl of Northumberland. At the Earl's house, he became a prolific mathematician and astronomer to whom the theory of refraction is attributed.
- Birthplace: Oxford, United Kingdom
- Thomas Postlethwaite (; 1731 – 4 May 1798) was an English clergyman and Cambridge fellow, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1789 to 1798.
- Birthplace: Lancashire, United Kingdom
- Thomas Robert Malthus (; 13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834) was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography.In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the populace, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to utilize abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view that has become known as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre". Populations had a tendency to grow until the lower class suffered hardship, want and greater susceptibility to famine and disease, a view that is sometimes referred to as a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. He saw population growth as being inevitable whenever conditions improved, thereby precluding real progress towards a utopian society: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man". As an Anglican cleric, Malthus saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behaviour. Malthus wrote: That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and,That the superior power of population is repressed by moral restraint, vice and misery. Malthus criticized the Poor Laws for leading to inflation rather than improving the well-being of the poor. He supported taxes on grain imports (the Corn Laws), because food security was more important than maximizing wealth. His views became influential, and controversial, across economic, political, social and scientific thought. Pioneers of evolutionary biology read him, notably Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He remains a much-debated writer. Malthus himself used only his middle name, Robert.
- Birthplace: Surrey, United Kingdom
W. T. Tutte
Dec. at 84 (1917-2002)William Thomas "Bill" Tutte OC FRS FRSC (; 14 May 1917 – 2 May 2002) was a British codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of graph theory and matroid theory.Tutte's research in the field of graph theory proved to be of remarkable importance. At a time when graph theory was still a primitive subject, Tutte commenced the study of matroids and developed them into a theory by expanding from the work that Hassler Whitney had first developed around the mid 1930s. Even though Tutte's contributions to graph theory have been influential to modern graph theory and many of his theorems have been used to keep making advances in the field, most of his terminology was not in agreement with their conventional usage and thus his terminology is not used by graph theorists today. "Tutte advanced graph theory from a subject with one text (D. Kőnig's) toward its present extremely active state."- Birthplace: Newmarket, Suffolk, United Kingdom
- Walter William Rouse Ball (1850–1925), known as W. W. Rouse Ball, was a British mathematician, lawyer, and fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1878 to 1905. He was also a keen amateur magician, and the founding president of the Cambridge Pentacle Club in 1919, one of the world's oldest magic societies.
- Birthplace: Hampstead, London, United Kingdom
- Walcher of Malvern, also known as Walcher of Lorraine, was the second Prior of Great Malvern Priory in Worcestershire, England, and a noted astronomer, astrologer and mathematician. He has been described as an important transitional figure, whose observations and writings reflected the transformation of the astronomy of the Latin West from its traditional focus on computing dates in the ecclesiastical calendar and studying the rudiments of Roman astronomy to the use of ancient astronomical computational methods learned from Arabic zijes and other Islamic sources.
- William Hopkins FRS (2 February 1793 – 13 October 1866) was an English mathematician and geologist. He is famous as a private tutor of aspiring undergraduate Cambridge mathematicians, earning him the sobriquet the "senior-wrangler maker." He also made important contributions in asserting a solid, rather than fluid, interior for the Earth and explaining many geological phenomena in terms of his model. However, though his conclusions proved to be correct, his mathematical and physical reasoning were subsequently seen as unsound.
- Birthplace: Kingston on Soar, United Kingdom
- William Kingdon Clifford (4 May 1845 – 3 March 1879) was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry. In his philosophical writings he coined the expression "mind-stuff".
- Birthplace: Exeter, United Kingdom
- William Oughtred ( AWT-ed; 5 March 1574 – 30 June 1660) was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier invented logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales (lines, or rules) upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622. He also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.
- Birthplace: Eton, United Kingdom
- William George Penney, Baron Penney (24 June 1909 – 3 March 1991), was an English mathematician and professor of mathematical physics at the Imperial College London and later the rector of Imperial College. He is acknowledged as having had a leading role in the development of Britain's nuclear programme, a clandestine programme started in 1942 during World War II which produced the first British atomic bomb in 1952.As the head of the British delegation working in the Manhattan Project, Penney initially carried out calculations to predict the damage effects generated by the blast wave of an atomic bomb. Upon returning home, Penney directed Britain's own nuclear weapons directorate, codename Tube Alloys, and directed scientific research at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment which resulted in the first detonation of a British nuclear bomb, (codename Operation Hurricane) in 1952. After the test, Penney became chief adviser to the newly created British government's United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). He was later chairman of the authority, which he used in international negotiations to control nuclear testing with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Penney's notable scientific contributions included the mathematics for complex wave dynamics, both in shock and gravity waves, proposing optimization problems and solutions in hydrodynamics (which plays a major role in materials science and metallurgy.) During his later years, Penney lectured in mathematics and physics, and was tenured as the Rector of the Imperial College London until his death.
- Birthplace: United Kingdom, with Dependencies and Territories, Gibraltar
William Shanks
Dec. at 70 (1812-1882)William Shanks (25 January 1812 – June 1882) was a British amateur mathematician. Shanks is famous for his calculation of π to 707 places, accomplished in 1873, which, however, was only correct up to the first 527 places. This error was highlighted in 1944 by D. F. Ferguson (using a mechanical desk calculator).Shanks earned his living by owning a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring, which left him enough time to spend on his hobby of calculating mathematical constants. His routine was as follows: he would calculate new digits all morning; and then he would spend all afternoon checking his morning's work. To calculate π, Shanks used Machin's formula: π 4 = 4 arctan ( 1 5 ) − arctan ( 1 239 ) {\displaystyle {\frac {\pi }{4}}=4\arctan \left({\frac {1}{5}}\right)-\arctan \left({\frac {1}{239}}\right)} Shanks's approximation was the longest expansion of π until the advent of the digital electronic computer about one century later. Shanks also calculated e and the Euler–Mascheroni constant γ to many decimal places. He published a table of primes up to 60 000 and found the natural logarithms of 2, 3, 5 and 10 to 137 places. Shanks died in Houghton-le-Spring, County Durham, England in June 1882, aged 70, and was buried at the local Hillside Cemetery on 17 June 1882.- Birthplace: Corsenside, United Kingdom
William Whiston
Dec. at 84 (1667-1752)William Whiston (9 December 1667 – 22 August 1752) was an English theologian, historian, and mathematician, a leading figure in the popularisation of the ideas of Isaac Newton. He is now probably best known for helping to instigate the Longitude Act in 1714 (and his attempts to win the rewards that it promised) and his important translations of the Antiquities of the Jews and other works by Josephus (which are still in print). He was a prominent exponent of Arianism and wrote A New Theory of the Earth. Whiston succeeded his mentor Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. In 1710 he lost the professorship and was expelled from the university as a result of his unorthodox religious views. Because Whiston recognized the Bible as a book of spiritual truth, he rejected the notion of eternal torment in hellfire. He viewed it as absurd and cruel, as well as an insult to God. What especially pitted him against church authorities, was he viewed the Trinity as a lie after extensive research convinced him the origin of the Trinity teaching to be pagan.- Birthplace: Twycross, United Kingdom
