Thomas Kirkman

Thomas Penyngton Kirkman (* March 31, 1806 in Bolton, † February 4, 1895 in Bowdon, near Manchester ) was an English mathematician and priest, who is mainly known for his work on combinatorics.

Life and work

Kirkman went to school in Bolton and although he caught the attention of his teachers in the classical languages, his father with 14 forced him to back away from the school and to work for him. Only nine years later, he went against his father's wishes to study at Trinity College in Dublin, where he studied alongside philosophy, languages, mathematics and the exact sciences. In 1835 he entered the service of the Church of England. In 1839 he became vicar in Southworth in Lancashire and had the position until 1891. He published his first mathematical work in ladies and gentleman Diary 1845. In it he proved seven years before the existence of the later Jakob Steiner Steiner triple systems mentioned configurations.

However, in the memory of posterity Kirkman lives mainly continued because of the problem of the 15 schoolgirls 15 schoolgirl go to each third for seven days in a row off. They gruppiere so that two of them are only one day together. Both Arthur Cayley and Kirkman published solutions. The general case was solved in 1968 by DK Ray - Chaudhuri and Richard M. Wilson.

In 1853 he began a long series of papers on the classification of polyhedra, which eventually led to his induction into the Royal Society in 1857. For a competition of the Paris Academy in 1860, he immersed himself in the group theory, but in spite of high quality ( it lists it all transitive groups of degree ≤ 10 ) received neither his nor his competitors Camille Jordan and Émile Mathieu works submitted the price. Towards the end of his life he occupied himself more with knot theory and listed with Peter Guthrie Tait inequivalent knots with 8, 9 and 10 intersections.