Person: Walsh, John
John Walsh was an eccentric Irish mathematician who wrote on a wide variety of mathematical topics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- John Walsh was born at Shandrum, on the border of the County of Limerick, probably about the year 1786.
- He also held in kind remembrance one of his early school-fellows, John Harding, to whom in later life he dedicated a little tract on The General Principles of the Theory of Sound.
- When about 28 years of age, John Walsh, in company with Harding, removed to Cork.
- Mr Walsh is said to have been a careful and diligent writing-master, and to have succeeded in making his pupils in arithmetic understand and like the subject.
- However this may have been, Mr Walsh was for a series of years engaged in a constant endeavour to induce the principal learned societies of Europe to print his communications.
- The titles of some of Mr Walsh's papers will serve to throw light on the particular objects which he had in view.
- The equation of a curve transformed as above Mr Walsh calls its 'partial equation'.
- The mere list of titles above given, and it is far from being complete, affords evidence of considerable industry, and Mr Walsh's unpublished papers confirm this testimony.
- Thus, in a page headed Cubic Equations, he writes the name of Cardan opposite to a well-known algebraic solution, that of Walsh opposite to the same result put under another and less convenient form, and below these he gives a formula headed For a Complete Cubic by Walsh only.
- Mr Walsh committed similar errors without the intervention of a sleep.
- Besides Mr Walsh's own papers, there remain a large number of letters which had been received by him, in reply to his applications, from different learned societies.
- In a subsequent report by Poisson upon another communication, that great analyst, referring to the former one, stated explicitly that Mr Walsh's papers did not merit the attention of the Academy.
- Mr Walsh continued to pursue his avocation as a writing-master in Cork until the year 1845, when a paralytic seizure threw him almost helpless upon the charity of those who had known him in better days.
- Observe the admirable candour of the admission 'at least in my hands' with which poor Walsh is forced to qualify his harmless boast of the triumphs of his system.
- The remainder of poor Walsh's story is soon told.
- It was at the commencement of an awful period that John Walsh sought an asylum in the Cork Union.
- At the time of Mr Walsh's admission, the Union house built for the accommodation of 2,000 persons was already crowded.
- Amid this scene of national woe and calamity in the famine year of 1847, poor Walsh breathed his last.
- Mr Walsh was a man of agreeable address, and, when treated with the respect which he thought due to himself, of friendly and courteous manners.
- Mr Walsh is an extreme instance of a class of persons, who, without having mastered the very elements of received science, spend their lives in attempting its subversion and in the vain endeavour to substitute in its place some visionary creation of their own fancy.
Born about 1786, Shandrum, County Limerick, Ireland. Died 1847, Cork, Ireland.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Ireland
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @George-Boole
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
