Joseph Wedderburn was the tenth of fourteen children of Alexander Wedderburn of Pearsie, a physician, and Anne Ogilvie. He was educated at Forfar Academy then in 1895 his parents sent Joseph and his younger brother Ernest to live in Edinburgh with their paternal uncle, J R Maclagan Wedderburn, allowing them to attend George Watson's College. This house was at 3 Glencairn Crescent in the West End of the city.[4]
Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Wedderburn enlisted in the British Army as a private. He was the first person at Princeton to volunteer for that war, and had the longest war service of anyone on the staff. He served with the Seaforth Highlanders in France, as Lieutenant (1914), then as Captain of the 10th Battalion (1915–18). While a Captain in the Fourth Field Survey Battalion of the Royal Engineers in France, he devised sound-ranging equipment to locate enemy artillery.
He returned to Princeton after the war, becoming Associate Professor in 1921 and editing the Annals of Mathematics until 1928. While at Princeton, he supervised only three PhDs, one of them being Nathan Jacobson. In his later years, Wedderburn became an increasingly solitary figure and may even have suffered from depression. His isolation after his 1945 early retirement was such that his death from a heart attack was not noticed for several days. His Nachlass was destroyed, as per his instructions.
In all, Wedderburn published about 40 books and papers, making important advances in the theory of rings, algebras and matrix theory.
In 1905, Wedderburn published a paper that included three claimed proofs of a theorem stating that a noncommutative finitedivision ring could not exist. The proofs all made clever use of the interplay between the additive group of a finite division algebraA, and the multiplicative groupA* = A-{0}. Parshall (1983) notes that the first of these three proofs had a gap not noticed at the time. Meanwhile, Wedderburn's Chicago colleague Dickson also found a proof of this result but, believing Wedderburn's first proof to be correct, Dickson acknowledged Wedderburn's priority. But Dickson also noted that Wedderburn constructed his second and third proofs only after having seen Dickson's proof. Parshall concludes that Dickson should be credited with the first correct proof.
His best known book is his Lectures on Matrices (1934),[7] which Jacobson praised as follows:
That this was the result of a number of years of painstaking labour is evidenced by the bibliography of 661 items (in the revised printing) covering the period 1853 to 1936. The work is, however, not a compilation of the literature, but a synthesis that is Wedderburn's own. It contains a number of original contributions to the subject.
— Nathan Jacobson, quoted in Taylor 1949
About Wedderburn's teaching:
He was apparently a very shy man and much preferred looking at the blackboard to looking at the students. He had the galley proofs from his book "Lectures on Matrices" pasted to cardboard for durability, and his "lecturing" consisted of reading this out loud while simultaneously copying it onto the blackboard.
Karen Parshall (1983) "In pursuit of the finite division algebra theorem and beyond: Joseph H M Wedderburn, Leonard Dickson, and Oswald Veblen," Archives of International History of Science 33: 274–99.
Karen Parshall (1985) "Joseph H. M. Wedderburn and the structure theory of algebras," Archive for History of Exact Sciences 32: 223–349.
Karen Parshall (1992) "New Light on the Life and Work of Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn (1882–1948)," in Menso Folkerts et al. (eds.): Amphora: Festschrift für Hans Wußing zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, Birkhäuser Verlag, 523–537.
