Person: Milne-Thomson, Louis Melville

Louis Milne-Thomson was an English applied mathematician best known for his textbooks on applied mathematics.

Louis was the eldest of his parents' sons.
Milne-Thomson entered Clifton College in Bristol in 1906 as a classical scholar and in his final year at the College he won a scholarship to study mathematics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Milne-Thomson was appointed as an assistant mathematics master at Winchester College in 1914.
After teaching for seven years at Winchester College, Milne-Thomson left in 1921 to take up an appointment as professor of mathematics at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
The most important topic that Milne-Thomson undertook research on near the start of his career was compiling tables.
Of course the main mathematical tool used in constructing tables was the method of finite differences and in 1933 Milne-Thomson published his first textbook, The Calculus of Finite Differences, a text in which he set out to explain to students the techniques which he used in table making.
His next text was also to become a classic but it marked a change in direction in Milne-Thomson's research interests.
In 1956 Milne-Thomson reached the age of sixty-five years and retired from the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
Let us now look briefly at some papers which Milne-Thomson published between 1940 and his final paper in 1972.
Two years later Milne-Thomson published a sequel entitled Antiplane elastic systems.

Born 1 May 1891, Ealing, London, England. Died 21 August 1974, Sevenoaks, Kent, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

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