Person: Baker, Henry Frederick

Henry Baker spent his whole life in Cambridge and worked on Geometry and Analysis and inspired a younger generation of geometers.

Baker would remain at Cambridge for the whole of his career, strongly influencing the teaching of pure mathematics in that university and in the rest of Great Britain.
Baker, while on a visit to Göttingen, was inspired by Klein to study algebraic function theory.
In 1943 Baker published An Introduction to Plane Geometry which was reprinted in 1971.
Baker also undertook the extremely large task of editing Sylvester's papers.
The four volumes of the Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester were edited and published by Baker between 1904 and 1912, and with these volumes he produced a fitting tribute to the great mathematician.
Elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1898, it was indeed highly appropriate that Baker won the Society's Sylvester Medal in 1910.
His address to the Association provided an opportunity for Baker to explain his feelings about the relation of pure mathematics to other sciences.
Baker inspired a younger generation of geometers.

Born 3 July 1866, Cambridge, England. Died 17 March 1956, Cambridge, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Astronomy, Origin England

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive