Professor De Morgan,—the great mathematician and teacher whose books changed
and raised the whole character of mathe- matical study in England, —died this day week, and was buried at Mensal Green on Thursday last. His health had been shaken not many years ago by the loss of a son, a very able and promising young man, who inherited, we believe, not a little of his father's great mathematical capacity, but the proximate cause of his death was nervous prostration. His life had been one of extraordinary labour and great achievement. His numerous mathematical, astronomical, literary, and biographical articles in the Penny Cyclopa•dia made up, we believe, nearly one-sixth of that enormous work (itself twenty-seven folio volumes). Besides these, his two treatises (mathematical and popular) on Probabilities, his Differ- ential and Integral Calculus, his Arithmetic, Algebra, Trigono- metry, and treatise on Double Algebra were more than sufficient achievements even for the lifetime of an industrious man of genius. And over and above all these undertakings, his miscellaneous essays contributed to various newspapers and reviews were enough to have occupied the leisure of an ordinary man. Yet he died in his sixty-fifth year, and after gaining as much of the hearty affection of his contemporaries as usually falls to the lot of far less busy and less preoccupied men. We have given an imperfect sketch of his character in another column.
Previous page
