Person: Cherry, Thomas Macfarland

Thomas MacFarland Cherry was an Australian mathematician who was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Melbourne for many years.

Thomas was brought up in Glen Iris on the outskirts of Melbourne which at that time was almost in the country.
An indication of the rural nature of Glen Iris is that Thomas had to walk over 6 km each day to attend primary school.
In 1924 Cherry won the Smith prize for applied mathematics and was elected a fellow of Trinity College.
Cherry also spent one term teaching at the University of Edinburgh in 1927 substituting for Charles Galton Darwin (son of George Howard Darwin).
During his time as a fellow of Trinity College, Cherry spent time with his two main hobbies, mountaineering and scouting.
Cherry had returned to Australia in March 1929 to take up a professorship at the University of Melbourne.
Let us look more closely at a few of Cherry's papers to give at least an indication of the topics on which he undertook research.
In the second part of the paper, published two years later, Cherry extended his results to cover the case where circulation is not zero.
In On expansions in eigenfunctions, particularly in Bessel functions (1949) Cherry gives a form of the integral theorems of Fourier, Hankel and Heinrich Weber which is applicable to functions which are exponentially large at infinity.
In early 1965 Cherry suffered a heart attack after a particularly difficult incident during his climbing.
Cherry received many distinctions for his contributions to mathematics.

Born 21 May 1898, Glen Iris, Melbourne, Australia. Died 21 November 1966, Melbourne, Australia.

View full biography at MacTutor

Astronomy, Origin Australia

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

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