Person: Macmahon, Percy Alexander

Percy MacMahon was a Maltese-born mathematician who worked in number theory and combinatorics.

MacMahon was educated at a school in Cheltenham and was always destined for a military career.
MacMahon was a candidate to fill the vacant Savilian Chair, as was Esson, and after Esson was appointed MacMahon wrote to Sir Joseph Larmor expressing his feelings at losing out to Esson.
One would have to say that MacMahon was fully justified in feeling aggrieved at losing out to Esson.
Before he was a candidate for the Savilian Chair of Geometry, MacMahon had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1890.
It was Alfred George Greenhill who taught MacMahon at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and Greenhill's interests at that time had a large influence on MacMahon's early work.
In 1884 MacMahon calculated a table of values based on Greenhill's model.
MacMahon then worked on invariants of binary quartic forms, following Cayley and Sylvester.
This study of symmetric functions led MacMahon to study partitions and Latin squares, and for many years he was considered the leading worker in this area.
MacMahon wrote a two volume treatise Combinatory analysis (volume one in 1915 and the second volume in the following year) which has become a classic.
This book shows another of the topics which fascinated MacMahon, namely the construction of patterns which can be repeated to fill the plane.
MacMahon was well respected in his day.
MacMahon received many honours.

Born 26 September 1854, Sliema, Malta. Died 25 December 1929, Bognor-Regis, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Malta, Puzzles And Problems

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

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