Percy Alexander MacMahon

Percy Alexander MacMahon ( born September 26, 1854 in Sliema, Malta, † December 25, 1929 in Bognor Regis, England ) was a British mathematician who worked on combinatorics.

Life and work

MacMahon was the son of Brigadier-General and attended Cheltenham College and from 1870 to 1872, the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. From 1873 he served as an artillery officer in India, first in Madras, then in Lucknow and then in the Punjab on the border with Afghanistan in Kohat (1st Mountain Battery of the Royal Artillery ). In 1877 he became ill and returned in 1878 but returned to England, which he spared participation in the following bloody conflicts in Afghanistan. He was stationed, among others, in Dover, and from 1880 he attended the advanced class for artillery officers in Woolwich. After this completed successfully, he was promoted in 1881 to captain ( Captain ). The following year he became a teacher in Woolwich, where he met the mathematics professor Alfred George Greenhill, under whose influence he plunged into the study of the developed in England by Arthur Cayley, James Joseph Sylvester and George Salmon invariant theory and both Cayley and Sylvester impressed with his work. In 1888 he was appointed Assistant Inspector of the Arsenal at Woolwich. In 1891 he became a lecturer ( instructor ) for electricity at the Royal Artillery College, Woolwich, promoted to professor later. In 1898, he went in the military to retire. The year before he suffered a disappointment, as it is a far less more capable mathematician ( Essonne ) was preferred in place of Sylvester on the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford.

MacMahon 1890 was elected to the Royal Society, the Royal Medal in 1900 and he whose Sylvester Medal he received in 1919. In 1923 he was awarded the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society, whose member he which he was president in 1883 and 1894 to 1896. In 1879 he was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, of which he was President in 1917. He was also governor of Winchester College. 1902 to 1914 he was one of the secretaries of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was more honorary doctorates, including the Trinity College in Dublin, Cambridge and Aberdeen.

MacMahon is known for his work in combinatorics abzählender, about which he wrote the first textbook. He dealt next invariant theory with symmetric functions, partitions ( he published tables with partitions of numbers to 200 ). , And Latin squares

MacMahon also focused on recreational mathematics and wrote articles and a book in 1921. In 1892 he was awarded with Major J. Jocelyn a patent for appliances to be used in playing a new class of games ( to German as: equipment for use with a new class of games, UK Patent No. 3927 ). In this he described, among others, a domino -like game with triangles as basic building blocks, which is known as MacMahon mosaic today. In addition, a puzzle with colored cubes from which you should put together a larger cube, which was then marketed as " Mayblox " in London.

Writings

• Combinatory Analysis. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1915/1916 (on the Internet Archive: Volume 1, 1, 2 ), Chelsea 1960, Dover 2004
• An introduction to combinatory analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1920 ( on the Internet Archive:, )
• New mathematical pastimes, Cambridge University Press, 1921 ( on the Internet Archive :), 1930, 2004
• George Andrews ( ed.): Collected Papers. MIT Press, 1978.
• George Andrews ( Ed.): Number Theory, Invariants and Applications. MIT Press, 1986.