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Person: Smith, Henry John Stephen

Henry Smith was an Irish mathematician whose most important contributions are in number theory where he worked on elementary divisors.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• Smith became a fellow, then a tutor at Balliol College.
• At the time that Eleanor moved in, Smith was living in St Giles' but in 1874 he was appointed as keeper of the University Museum and moved into the keeper's house in the Museum in South Parks Road.
• Influenced by Gauss, Smith's most important contributions are in number theory where he worked on elementary divisors.
• Smith also extended Gauss's theorem on real quadratic forms to complex quadratic forms.
• In it Smith analyses the work of other mathematicians but adds much of his own.
• Smith also wrote on geometrical topics.
• Smith is remembered for the Smith normal form for matrices.
• Smith joined the London Mathematical Society during the first year of its existence and he became its sixth president in 1874-76.
• Despite health problems when he was a student, Smith mostly enjoyed excellent health until 1881 when his heath began to deteriorate, mainly due to the extremely high level of work that he continued to undertake.
• The Academy of Sciences in Paris set the question for the 1882 Grand Prix in Mathematics to be precisely the problem on the number of ways that an integer can be expressed as the sum of kkk squares that Smith had solved in his 1867 paper The orders and genera of quadratic forms containing more than three indeterminates.
• Smith wrote to Hermite who then realised that the Academy of Sciences had blundered by setting a problem which had already been solved.
• Hermite asked Smith if he would cooperate in trying not to make the Academy look foolish, and simply submit a solution to the Grand Prix question.
• This Smith did but died before the prize was awarded.
• After his death the Academy awarded two full prizes, one to Smith and one to Minkowski.

Born 2 November 1826, Dublin, Ireland. Died 9 February 1883, Oxford, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

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Origin Ireland

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@J-J-O'Connor

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

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