Todhunter

Isaac Todhunter

Born: 23 Nov 1820 in Rye, Sussex, England
Died: 1 March 1884 in Cambridge, England

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Todhunter's father died when Isaac was six years old and his mother moved to Hastings and opened a girls' school. Todhunter was sent to a school in Hastings but did not show any promise. However after being sent to a new school in London he made excellent progress.

After leaving school he became an assistant school master but attended evening classes at London University where he was taught by De Morgan. He passed the entrance examinations and won a scholarship to study mathematics at London University, where in addition to De Morgan he was taught by Sylvester. Todhunter obtained his MA in 1844 with a prize for the top mark in the examination.

He went to St John's College Cambridge being senior wrangler and Smith's prizeman in 1848. He became a fellow of the college and taught there for 15 years. He also undertook work as a private tutor and P G Tait and E J Routh were among his pupils.

He progressed from fellow to principal mathematical lecturer at St John's College where he resisted all attempts to reduce the central role of Euclid in mathematics courses. Sylvester had said in his British Association address of 1869

I should rejoice to see ... Euclid honourably shelved or buried deeper than ever did plummet sound, out of the schoolboy's reach....
Todhunter replied
Whatever may have produced the dislike to Euclid in the illustrious mathematician..., there is no ground for supposing that he would have been better pleased with the substitutes which are now offered and recommended in its place.
Todhunter was always ready to respond to arguments and when Tait said
From the majority of the papers in our few mathematical journals, one would almost be led to fancy that British mathematicians have too much pride to use a simple method, while an unnecessarily complex one be had.
Todhunter replied
I take down some of these volumes, and turning over the pages I find article after article by Profs. Cayley, Salmon and Sylvester, not to mention many other highly distinguished names. The idea of amending the elaborate essays of these eminent mathematicians seems to me something like the audacity recorded in poetry with which a superhuman hero climbs to the summit of the Indian Olympus and overturns the thrones of Vishnu, Brahma and Siva.
Todhunter is best known for his textbooks and his writing on the history of mathematics. Among his textbooks are Analytic Statics (1853), Plane Coordinate Geometry (1855), Examples of Analytic geometry in Three Dimensions (1858). He also wrote some more elementary texts, for example Algebra (1858), Trigonometry (1859), Theory of Equations (1861), Euclid (1862), Mechanics (1867) and Mensuration (1869).

Among his books on the history of mathematics are A History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to That of Laplace (1865, reprinted 1965) and History of the Mathematical Theories of Attraction (1873).

Todhunter was a founding member of the London Mathematical Society in 1865 along with De Morgan.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. E J Routh, Isaac Todhunter, Proc. Roy. Soc. 37 (1884), 27-32.
  3. A Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1916), 134-136. 
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JOC/EFR March 1996