Percy Alexander MacMahon

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Percy MacMahon

Percy Alexander MacMahon (born September 26, 1854 in Sliema , Malta , † December 25, 1929 in Bognor Regis , England ) was a British mathematician who dealt with combinatorics .

Live and act

MacMahon was the son of a brigadier general and attended Cheltenham College and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich from 1870 to 1872 . From 1873 he was an artillery officer in India, first in Madras , then in Lucknow and then in the Punjab on the border with Afghanistan in Kohat (1st Mountain Battery of the Royal Artillery). In 1877, however, he fell ill and returned to England in 1878, which saved him from participating in the bloody conflicts that followed in Afghanistan. He was stationed in Dover , among other places , and from 1880 he attended the advanced class for artillery officers in Woolwich. After successfully completing this, he was promoted to captain in 1881. The following year he became a teacher in Woolwich, where he also met mathematics professor Alfred George Greenhill, under whose influence he threw himself into preoccupation with the invariant theory developed in England by Arthur Cayley , James Joseph Sylvester and George Salmon , and both Cayley and Sylvester impressed with his work. In 1888 he became Assistant Inspector of the Woolwich Arsenal. In 1891 he became a lecturer (instructor) for electricity at the Royal Artillery College in Woolwich, later promoted to professor. In 1898 he retired from the military. The year before, he suffered disappointment when a far less able mathematician (Esson) was chosen as Sylvester's successor to the Savilian Professorship in Geometry at Oxford .

MacMahon was elected to the Royal Society in 1890 , whose Royal Medal he received in 1900 and whose New Year's Medal he received in 1919. In 1923 he received the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society , of which he was a member since 1883 and whose president he was from 1894 to 1896. In 1879 he was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society , of which he was president in 1917. He was also the governor of Winchester College . From 1902 to 1914 he was one of the secretaries of the British Association for the Advancement of Science . He has received several honorary doctorates, including from Trinity College in Dublin , Cambridge and Aberdeen .

MacMahon is known for his work in counting combinatorics, on which he wrote the first textbook. In addition to invariant theory, he dealt with symmetrical functions, partitions (he published tables with the partitions of numbers up to 200) and Latin squares .

MacMahon was also into entertainment mathematics and wrote essays about it and a book in 1921. In 1892 he received a patent with Major J. Jocelyn for appliances to be used in playing a new class of games (in German, for example: appliances for use with a new class of games , UK patent number 3927). In this he described, among other things, a domino-like game with triangles as the basic building blocks, which is known today as the MacMahon mosaic . In addition, a puzzle with colored cubes, from which one should put together a larger cube, which was marketed as “Mayblox” in London at the time.

McMahon was a master of mental arithmetic and regularly won against S. Ramanujan when he was in England. Hardy uses MacMahon as a comparison for Ramanujan's mental arithmetic skills, emphasizing that Ramanujan did this like others and MacMahon was usually a bit faster and more accurate. He is portrayed by Kevin McNally in the film adaptation of Ramanujan's life, The Poetry of Infinity .

Fonts

  • Combinatory Analysis. 2 volumes. Cambridge University Press, 1915/1916 (in the Internet archive: Volumes 1 , 1 , 2 ), Chelsea 1960, Dover 2004
  • An introduction to combinatory analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1920 (in the Internet archive: [1] , [2] )
  • New mathematical pastimes , Cambridge University Press, 1921 (in the Internet archive: [3] ), 1930, 2004
  • George Andrews (Ed.): Collected Papers. MIT Press, 1978.
  • George Andrews (Ed.): Number Theory, Invariants and Applications. MIT Press, 1986.

Web links

Commons : Percy Alexander MacMahon  - Collection of Images

Remarks

  1. ↑ sometimes referred to as lecturer in physics
  2. ↑ George E. Andrews , The man who knew infinity, a report on the movie, Notices AMS, 2016, No. 2, pdf
  3. ↑ Hardy in Ramanujan, Collected Papers, Cambridge 1927, pp. XXXV
personal data
SURNAME MacMahon, Percy Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1854
PLACE OF BIRTH Sliema , Malta
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1929
Place of death Bognor Regis , England