Johns Hopkins University Press James Joseph Sylvester: Jewish Mathematician in a Victorian World

Building on the substantial foundation of her James Joseph Sylvester: Life and Work in Letters, Parshall (history and mathematics, U. of Virginia) investigates the remarkable career of a mathematician whose faith was considered before his ideas were assessed, whose place in his academic culture was both secure and precarious, and whose various forays into making a living and practicing mathematics at the same time were not completely supported by his eccentricities. Sylvester's work led from the theory of elimination to the theory of invariants and the theory of numbers but he was denied educational and career opportunities because he would not renounce the faith of his birth. However, his hungry, restless and unsatisfied mind led to far more than publishing 1,300 pages of journal articles, teaching in America, and founding the American Journal of Mathematics as well as editing two leading British scholarly periodicals. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Here, in this first biographical study of James Joseph Sylvester, Karen Hunger Parshall makes a signal contribution to the history of mathematics, Victorian history, and the history of science.A brilliant Cambridge student at first denied a degree because of his faith, Sylvester came twice to America to teach mathematics, ultimately becoming one of Daniel Coit Gilman's faculty recruits at Johns Hopkins in 1876 and winning the coveted Savilian Professorship of Geometry at Oxford in 1883. He held professorships of natural philosophy, worked as an actuary, was called to the bar, and taught mathematics to cadets training for engineering and artillery posts in the British Army. During his long, distinguished career he also edited England's Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics and established the American Journal of Mathematics, the first sustained mathematics research journal in the United States. Situating Sylvester's life within the political, religious, mathematical, and social currents of nineteenth-century England, Parshall penetrates the myth of this venerated figure, revealing how he lived, the choices he made and why, how the world in which he lived affected him -- and how he affected that world. The story of Sylvester's life sheds light on the evolution of mathematical thought. It also examines the ways in which mathematics may be done and what factors may shape a mathematician's ideas. Parshall explores the development of academic professionalization, nineteenth-century mathematical culture, and the emergence of modern algebra as a mathematical discipline. She highlights the human side of what many view as that most arcane and otherworldly of intellectual endeavors, mathematics, which indeed answers to such diverse factors as religion, ego, and depression. Autorid: Karen Hunger Parshall