Mathematician

• Goodheart, Lawrence B. "Wright, Elizur." American National Biography Online. American Council of Learned Societies: Oxford University Press, 2000.

James Joseph was born on Sept. 3, 1814, to Abraham Joseph Sylvester and was a Jew. Educated at the Royal Institution School, Liverpool, he proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he earned the coveted Second Wrangler in mathematics in 1837. Unable to swear to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church, however, Sylvester was barred from obtaining a degree. Still, he earned the post of Professor of Natural Philosophy at University College, London, on Nov. 25, 1837. Single all his life, and dedicated more to public research than to regular teaching, Sylvester led a restless academic life. Appointed as Professor of Mathematics, University of Virginia, 1841, the year he obtained an M.A. degree from the University of Dublin, he resigned soon after, in March 1842, evidently because of an altercation with a student who had insulted him, and returned to England to work at Equity and Law Life Assurance Company from 1845 to 1855. He was called to the Bar in 1850. His next post was as Professor of Mathematics, Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, from 1855 to 1870. During this stint he became President of the London Mathematical Society and of the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association. Sylvester again left academe, this time with just one book to his name, The Laws of Verse (1870), which he practiced with as marked originality and flare as he did the analysis of numbers. His finest poem, "Kepler's Apostrophe," movingly expresses the fierce unrepentance of any free-thinking researcher. Sylvester lived unemployed in London until 1877, when Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore engaged him as Professor of Mathematics. In America he founded the American Journal of Mathematics. By 1883 he left Baltimore to become Savilian Professor of Geometry at New College, Oxford University, until his retirement in 1894. Among the greatest mathematicians of the 19th century, Sylvester founded invariant algebra. He died on March 15, 1897, and was interred in the Jewish Cemetery, Ball's Pond, London.

• Fauvel, John. "James Joseph Sylvester: Poet." De Morgan Association Newsletter 5 (1997): 5-7.
• Parshall, Karen Hunger. James Joseph Sylvester: Life and Work in Letters. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. QA 29 .S95P37 1998 Mathematical Sciences Library
• --. "Sylvester, James Joseph (1814–1897)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
• M., P. E., and E. B. E. "Sylvester, James Joseph." Dictionary of National Biography. 258-29.
• Sylvester, James Joseph. The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester. Ed. H. F. Baker. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904-12. QA 3 .S87 Gerstein Library
• --. The Laws of Verse; or, Principles of versification exemplified in metrical translations, together with an annotated reprint of the inaugural presidential address to the mathematical and physical section of the British Association at Exeter. London: Longmans, 1870. LaE.Gr. S985k Robarts Library

Inventor, civil engineer, and molecular physicist, William John Macquorn Rankine was born July 5, 1820, in Edinburgh. After he was educated at the University of Edinburgh, he became surveyor on waterworks and railways in Dublin and Drogheda in Ireland and later for the Caledonian Railway. During this time he made valuable contributions to the understanding of axle fatigue. From 1848, Rankine dedicated himself to study of thermodynamics and published over 150 scientific papers, especially on the conversion of work into heat, and vice versa. The model of events in this conversion is called the Rankine cycle. Created a fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh, in 1849 and a fellow, Royal Society, in 1853, he was given the Queen Victoria chair of civil engineering and mechanics at Glasgow University in 1855. He wrote many standard textbooks for the period. He died on December 24, 1872, in Glasgow.

• B., G. C. [biography] The Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. XVI. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Rankine, William John Macquorn. A Manual of Applied Mechanics. London: Griffin, 1864. 3rd edn. TEM R Gerstein Library
• --. A Manual of Civil Engineering. 5th edn. London: Griffin, 1867. TE. R. Gerstein Library
• --. A Manual of Machinery and Millwork. London: Griffin, 1869. TEM Ran Gerstein Library
• --. Songs and Fables. Illus. by F.B. Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1874. 11652.e.19 British Library; PR 5209 R3S6 Robarts Library
• --. Useful Rules and Tables Relating to Mensuration, Engineering, Structures, and Machines. London: Griffin, 1866. TE. R Gerstein Library

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll (his pseudonym), was born in 1832 and educated at Rugby College and Christ Church, Oxford. Although a lecturer in mathematics there from 1855, Dodgson achieved international fame as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1866) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found there (1871). A boat ride with the three daughters of H. G. Liddell, dean of Christ Church -- Alice, Edith, and Lorina -- inspired him to write these tales, which include much of his extant verse. He published poetry as well in Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and Rhyme? and Reason? (1883). He died in 1898. For a biography, see Donald Serrell Thomas's Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (London: John Murray, 1996; PR 4612 T48 1996 Robarts Library). Roger Lancelyn Green edited his diaries (2 vols., 1954) and co-edited with Morton M. Cohen his letters (2 vols., 1979). See also The Annotated Alice, introduced by Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960; PR 4611 A55 1960 Robarts Library).

• Cohen, Morton N.. “Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge [Lewis Carroll] (1832-1898).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.