Chapter 1

1 SYLVESTOR, James Joseph (1814–1897), English algebraist, combinatorist, geometer, number theorist and poet; cofounder with Cayley of the theory of invariants (anticipated to some extent by Boole and Lagrange); spent two periods in the U.S. where he was a stimulant to mathematical research. In 1850 he introduced for the first time the word ‘matrix’, in the sense of ‘the mother of determinants’.

2 HAMILTON, William Rowan (1805–1865), Great Irish algebraist, astronomer and physicist.

3 CAYLEY, Arthur (1821–1895), English algebraist, geometer and analyst; contributed especially to theory of algebraic invariants and higher-dimensional geometry.

4 GRASSMANN, Hermann Gunterr (1809–1877), Born in Stettin, Prussia, now Szczecin in Poland, ...

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