Andrew Russell Forsyth | |
---|---|
Born | 18 June 1858 Glasgow, Scotland |
Died | 2 June 1942 South Kensington, England |
Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
Awards | Royal Medal (1897) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Liverpool Trinity College, Cambridge |
Academic advisors | Arthur Cayley |
Notable students | Edmund Taylor Whittaker |
Andrew Russell Forsyth, FRS,[1] FRSE (18 June 1858, Glasgow – 2 June 1942, South Kensington) was a British mathematician.[2][3]
Forsyth was born in Glasgow on 18 June 1858, the son of John Forsyth, a marine engineer, and his wife Christina Glen.[4]
Forsyth studied at Liverpool College and was tutored by Richard Pendlebury before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating senior wrangler in 1881.[5] He was elected a fellow of Trinity and then appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Liverpool at the age of 24. He returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1884 and became Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1895.[6]
Forsyth was forced to resign his chair in 1910 as a result of a scandal caused by his affair with Marion Amelia Boys, née Pollock, the wife of physicist C. V. Boys. Boys was granted a divorce on the grounds of Marion's adultery with Forsyth. Marion and Andrew Forsyth were later married.[7]
Forsyth became professor at the Imperial College of Science in 1913 and retired in 1923, remaining mathematically active into his seventies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886[1] and won its Royal Medal in 1897. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1908 at Rome.[8]
He is now remembered much more as an author of treatises than as an original researcher. His books have, however, often been criticized (for example by J. E. Littlewood, in his A Mathematician's Miscellany).[9] E. T. Whittaker was his only official student.[3]
He died in London on 2 June 1942 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.[4]
Forsyth received the degree of Doctor mathematicae (honoris causa) from the Royal Frederick University on 6 September 1902, when they celebrated the centennial of the birth of mathematician Niels Henrik Abel.[10][11]
Forsyth married Marion Amelia Pollock in 1910.[1]