James Joseph Sylvester

James Joseph Sylvester

James Joseph Sylvester (born September 3, 1814 in London , † March 15, 1897 ibid) was a British mathematician .

Live and act

Sylvester studied from 1831 at St John's College of Cambridge University , he was the first orthodox Jew , who was admitted to the university in Cambridge. James Joseph Sylvester did not receive his doctorate until 1872.

Sylvester became Professor of Physics at University College London in 1837 and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia in 1840, making him one of the first great mathematicians in the United States. He later returned to England and in 1855 became a mathematics professor at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich . From 1870 he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . In 1873 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He then went back to England and was a professor at Oxford from 1883 .

On December 7, 1863, he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences . From 1864 he was a corresponding and from 1883 a foreign member of the Goettinger Academy of Sciences . From 1866 he was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1974 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh , and in 1883 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

He invented several geometric instruments, such as the plagiograph (crooked pantograph ) and the geometric fan. He also researched together with Arthur Cayley in the field of invariant theory . Another area of ​​work was the theory of matrices and determinants . The name matrix was introduced by Sylvester in 1850, and Sylvester's theorem of inertia is named after him.

Among other things, he proved the following:

Every natural number n> 2 has exactly as many representations as the sum of consecutive natural numbers (smaller than n) as it has odd divisors. The number 1 is not counted as a divisor, but the number n itself is.

The New Year's Eve Medal of the Royal Society , of which he has been a member ( fellow ) since 1839, is named in his honor. The moon crater Sylvester is also named after him .

Fonts

• Henry Frederick Baker (Ed.): The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester. 4 volumes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1904-1912.
• On the Method of Reciprocants as containing an exhaustive Theory of the Singularities of Curves. Inaugural Lecture by Prof. Sylvester, FRS, delivered before the University of Oxford, December 12, 1885. In: Nature . Vol. 33, No. 845, 1886, pp. 222–231, doi : 10.1038 / 033222g0 , (an important work for algebra).
• Chemistry and Algebra. In: Nature. Vol. 17, No. 284, 1878, p. 284, doi : 10.1038 / 017284a0 , (here he introduces the term graph for representations in chemistry).

literature

• George E. Andrews : JJ Sylvester, Johns Hopkins and Partitions. In: Peter Duren , Richard A. Askey , Uta C. Merzbach (Eds.): A Century of Mathematics in America (= History of Mathematics. 1). American math. Soc., Providence, RI 1988, ISBN 0-8218-0124-4 , pp. 21-40, ( digitized ).
• Karen Hunger Parshall : James Joseph Sylvester. Jewish mathematician in a Victorian world. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 2006, ISBN 0-8018-8291-5 .
• Karen Hunger Parshall: James Joseph Sylvester. Life and Work in Letters. Clarendon Press, Oxford et al. 1998, ISBN 0-19-850391-1 .
• Karen Hunger Parshall, David E. Rowe : The emergence of the American mathematical research community, 1876-1900: JJ Sylvester, Felix Klein, and EH Moore (= History of Mathematics. 8). American Mathematical Society et al., Providence RI et al. 1994, ISBN 0-8218-9004-2 .

Web links

Commons : James Joseph Sylvester  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Max Noether “Sylvester”, Mathematical Annals
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  James Joseph Sylvester. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• James Joseph Sylvester in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
• Entry for Sylvester, James Joseph (1814-1897) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
• Spektrum.de: James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) September 1, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 788.
2. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter S. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 6, 2020 (French). 
3. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 237.
4. ^ Members of the previous academies. James Joseph Sylvester. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on June 23, 2015 . 
5. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 14, 2020 . 
6. ↑ Handicraft instructions for a crooked pantograph ( Memento of the original from February 12, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.