Henry John Stephen Smith

Henry John Stephen Smith, often cited HJS Smith, ( born November 2, 1826 in Dublin, † 9 February 1883 in Oxford ) was an English mathematician. His contributions to matrix theory and number theory in mathematics were of lasting importance. According to him, the Smith normal form of a matrix is named.

Life and work

Smith was born the fourth child of John Smith Barristen. His father died when Henry Smith was two years old. After his father's death, the family moved to England very soon. Smith's mother taught Smith until he was eleven. At the age of 15, he was in the Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, to school. His poor health forced the interruption of the school, but he was able to successfully prepare in Italy on a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, where he began to study in 1845. His studies were interrupted by illness; so he picked up during a France vacation malaria, but used this to study at the Sorbonne and at the College de France in Paris. In 1849 he graduated from Oxford with honors in the classical languages ​​and mathematics. He was a Fellow and Tutor at Balliol College. In 1860 he became a professor at the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford University. For financial reasons, he continued to teach at Balliol College until relieved him of the appointment as a Fellow of Corpus Christi College it.

Smith is best known for his work on number theory, in which an English mathematician, otherwise hardly operated in the 19th century. His greatest mathematical influence were the relevant writings of Carl Friedrich Gauss. Smith proved that every natural number can be represented as the sum of five and seven squares, and also gave a general method for determining the number of possible representations of a natural number by k squares at ( The Orders and genera of quadratic forms Containing more than three indeterminates, Proceedings Royal Society 1867). With the relative isolation of the English mathematics in this area it may be related that these results on the continent remained largely neglected and even been the subject of major Mathematics Prize of the Paris Academy in 1882. In order not to embarrass the Academy, gave Smith, who had previously written a protest note to Hermite, his solution of 1867 as a labor price and won the award together with Hermann Minkowski, but died before he could receive him.

Smith wrote in 1865 a comprehensive report on the theory of numbers, in which he summed up many of my own posts. In a work of 1875 in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, he also fractal sets such as the Sierpinski carpet and the Cantor set in advance.

For work on geometry in 1868 he received the Steiner Prize in Berlin. In 1861 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. 1874 to 1876 he was President of the London Mathematical Society.