Person: Scott (3), Robert Forsyth

Forsyth wrote important works on analysis which were responsible for introducing continental methods into the subject in Britain.

Forsyth entered Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1877 and there he studied under Cayley, graduating in 1881.
This type of fellowship was competitive and candidates had to submit a thesis; Forsyth's thesis proved deep results on double theta functions.
Although Forsyth was back in Liverpool, the city which had become his home, he did not remain there for very long, accepting a lectureship at Cambridge in 1884.
This is not surprising since the whole thrust of the book was to bring the great advances of Continental mathematics to Cambridge which Forsyth rightly saw as living in the past.
On Cayley's death Forsyth was appointed to his chair in 1895 becoming the Sadleirian professor of Pure Mathematics.
One would have to say that Forsyth was unlucky, for although he saw the importance of Continental mathematics, at the same time his greatest strengths lay in his ability to handle complex formulae.
Famous texts which Forsyth published before his 1893 work Theory of Functions of a complex variable , are A treatise on differential equations (1885), and Theory of differential equations published in six volumes between 1890 and 1906.
Not everyone had such a high opinion of Forsyth, however.

Born 18 June 1858, Glasgow, Scotland. Died 2 June 1942, London, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Scotland

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

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