William Kingdon Clifford

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William Kingdon Clifford

William Kingdon Clifford (born May 4, 1845 in Exeter , Devon , England , † March 3, 1879 in Madeira , Portugal ) was a British philosopher and mathematician .

Live and act

Even as a schoolboy, Clifford stood out for his talent in mathematics as well as in literature and classical languages ​​(and in gymnastics). From 1860 he studied at King's College London and from 1863 at Trinity College in Cambridge. In the Tripos Exams, he was Second Wrangler and in 1869 Fellow of Trinity College. In 1870 he took part in a solar eclipse expedition, where he was shipwrecked near Sicily. In 1871 he became professor of mathematics and mechanics at University College London . Three years later he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . Due to overwork, he suffered a first collapse in health in 1876, after which he sought rest in Algeria and Spain. After 18 months he returned to England briefly in 1878, but then went back on vacation. He died in Madeira when he was only 33 years old.

Clifford developed the theory of biquaternions , a generalization of Hamilton's quaternions . The Clifford algebras named after him are even more general . A function theory called Clifford analysis was also developed in these algebras . The Clifford Klein rooms are also named after him. He was influenced by the work of Bernhard Riemann on differential geometry and is also known for a short essay On the space theory of matter from 1870, which anticipated ideas of the general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein by considering the movement of matter as a consequence of the curvature of space, which would spread out in waves (of course without the concept of space-time). In the article he makes direct reference to Bernhard Riemann's habilitation lecture, which Clifford translated into English in 1873. In 1876 he showed the topological equivalence of a Riemann surface to a closed surface with holes. Clifford parallels are also named after him (an analog of the concept of parallel as two lines with constant distance in non-Euclidean spaces, whereby the Clifford parallels are not in one plane).

Clifford was known as an excellent teacher and for his essays on the philosophy of science. He also wrote a book about fairy tales for children, The little people . His wife Lucy Clifford (1846-1929), née Lane, whom he married in 1875, was a writer. Together they had a literary circle in London which met weekly on Sundays. After Clifford's death, his wife continued the salon. The Circle's Circle of Friends included a mixture of scientists and writers, including Thomas Huxley , John Tyndall , Robert Louis Stevenson , George Eliot , Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet (1845–1937), Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf ), James Clerk Maxwell . As a widow, Lucy Clifford was friends with Henry James .

From his philosophical essays, Clifford is known as the originator of the expressions Mind-Stuff and Tribal Self (which expresses the responsibility of the individual for the group to which he belongs) in the English-speaking world. He represented a monistic philosophy of the unity of consciousness and matter. He went strongly against obscurantist currents off and wrote, for example, in his essay The Ethics of Belief in 1877: It is to believe at any time, at any place and for every wrong something because of insufficient evidence ( it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone , to believe anything upon insufficient evidence ). This was then seen as a direct attack on religious thinkers who advocated blind faith . The philosopher William James , known as Clifford, faced Clifford in his Will to Believe lectures.

Fonts

  • Elements of Dynamics , two volumes, Macmillan 1878 and 1887
  • Seeing and thinking , London, Macmillan 1879, 1890
  • Common sense of the exact sciences , New York, Appleton, 1885 ( edited by Karl Pearson ), 1888, new edition by James R. Newman 1946 with a foreword by Bertrand Russell
  • Lectures and essays by the late William Kingdon Clifford (editors Leslie Stephen, Frederick Pollock), Macmillan 1879, 1886, 1901
  • Ethics of belief and other essays , Prometheus 1999
  • Conditions of mental development, and other essays , New York 1885
  • Selected works , New York, Humboldt publishing, 1889
  • Mathematical Papers , Macmillan 1882 (Editor Robert Tucker, Foreword Henry John Stephen Smith , 658 pages), Reprinted Chelsea 1968
  • Mathematical fragments, being facsimiles of his unfinished papers relating to the theory of graphs , London, Macmillan 1881
  • Clifford: Postulates of the Science of Space

literature

  • James R. Newman: William Clifford , Scientific American, February 1953
  • Alexander MacFarlane: Ten British Mathematicians of the 19. Century , 1916 , with a chapter on Clifford
  • Jean-Pierre Bourguignon , Hanna Nencka (editors): Geometry and nature: in memory of WK Clifford: a Conference on New Trends in Geometrical and Topological Methods in memory of William Kingdon Clifford (Madeira Conference July / _August 1995), American Mathematical Society 1997
  • M. Chisholm: William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1879) and his wife Lucy (1846-1929) , Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras, Vol. 7S, 1997, pp. 27-41.
  • M. Chisholm: Such Silver Currents - The Story of William and Lucy Clifford, 1845-1929. Cambridge, The Lutterworth Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7188-3017-2 .

Web links

Commons : William Kingdon Clifford  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

References

  1. ↑ Clifford Preliminary Sketch of Biquaternions , Proc. London Math. Soc. 4, 381-395, 1873
  2. ↑ see F. Brackx, R. Delanghe and F. Sommen, Clifford analysis . Research Notes in Mathematics, 76. Pitman, Boston, MA, 1982, or K. Gürlebeck, K. Habetha and W. Sprößig, Function Theory in Plane and Space . Basic studies in mathematics, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, 2006.
  3. ↑ Cambridge Philosophical Society Proceedings Vol. 2, 1876, pp. 157-158, presented there on February 21, 1870. Reprinted for example in Kasner, James R. Newman The world of mathematics , Vol. 1. There are also reprinted The exactness of the mathematical laws , the postulates of the science of space
  4. ^ On the Canonical Form and Dissection of a Riemann's Surface , Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Vol. 8, 1876, pp. 292-304
  5. ↑ Clifford On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves, Mind, Vol. 3, 1878, No. 9, pp. 57-67
personal data
SURNAME Clifford, William Kingdon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British philosopher and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH May 4, 1845
PLACE OF BIRTH Exeter , England
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1879
Place of death Madeira , Portugal