James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher ( born November 5, 1848 in Lewisham, Kent; † December 7, 1928 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician and astronomer.

Life and work

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher was the son of James Glaisher meteorologists and his wife, Cecilia Louisa, daughter of John Henry Belville.

As a lecturer at Cambridge University, he was mainly concerned with astronomy, number theory, special functions and the history of mathematics. In total, he has published over 400 works.

1871 Glaisher calculated 100 decimal digits of Euler's constant. Previously, William Shanks had 1867-1869 four calculations performed up to 68 decimal places over the years, which were only the first 48 correct. Three months after Glaisher 's calculation Shanks made ​​another attempt with 110 decimal places, of which only 101 were correct. Glaishers result was in 1877 by John Couch Adams surpassed with 263 decimal places.

1874 proved Glaisher that it is not more than 92 known solutions are the women's problem in the chess mathematics.

From 1871 to 1928 he was editor of the Messenger of Mathematics.

Glaisher remained unmarried. He died on 7 December 1928 in its premises at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Honors

1875 Glaisher was accepted as a member ( "Fellow" ) to the Royal Society, in 1913, the Sylvester Medal awarded him. He was also a member of numerous other British scientific societies such as the Royal Astronomical Society.

The London Mathematical Society awarded him on 12 November 1908 from the De Morgan Medal. Until then, he had already given more than 300 articles in the fields and numerical integration, number theory, elliptic functions (especially series expansions related to the theta functions ) written in differential equations and astronomy.