Person: Metzler, William Henry

William Metzler was a Canadian mathematician who published papers on the theory of matrices and determinants.

He was awarded a Ph.D. by Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts in 1892 for his thesis On the Roots of Matrices written with William Story and Henry Taber as advisors.
Metzler was appointed to Syracuse University, New York, where he became a professor in 1895.
William Henry Metzler, for instance, had found a proof of a conjecture about the relation between the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of a square matrix and the determinants of some of its minors.
We list a few of Metzler's papers: Homogeneous strains (1893); On certain aggregates of determinant minors (1901); On the rank of a matrix (1913); On the expression of certain minors of the lth compound of a determinant as a function of the elements of a single line of the mth compound (1913); Some relations between compound determinants (1925); On an expression of a minor of order two of the Mth compound of a determinant A in terms of minors of A of order higher than M (1925); On certain determinant relations (1926).
In June 1918 Metzler joined the Edinburgh Mathematical Society and remained a member of the Society throughout his career.

Born 18 September 1863, Odessa, Ontario, Canada. Died 18 April 1943, Syracuse, New York, USA.

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Origin Canada

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