James Joseph Sylvester (nonfiction)
File:James Joseph Sylvester.jpg|thumb|James Joseph Sylvester.]]James Joseph Sylvester FRS (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.
Sylvester invented a great number of mathematical terms such as "matrix" (in 1850), "graph" (combinatorics), and "discriminant".
He coined the term "totient" for Euler's totient function φ(n).
In 1872, he finally received his B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge, having been denied the degrees due to his being a Jew.
One of Sylvester's lifelong passions was for poetry; he read and translated works from the original French, German, Italian, Latin and Greek, and many of his mathematical papers contain illustrative quotes from classical poetry. Following his early retirement, Sylvester (1870) published a book entitled The Laws of Verse in which he attempted to codify a set of laws for prosody in poetry.
At his death, he was professor at Oxford.
His collected scientific work fills four volumes. In 1880, the Royal Society of London awarded Sylvester the Copley Medal, its highest award for scientific achievement; in 1901, it instituted the Sylvester Medal in his memory, to encourage mathematical research after his death in Oxford.
In Discrete geometry he is remembered for Sylvester's Problem and a result on the orchard problem.
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External links:
- James Joseph Sylvester @ Wikipedia