Memoir of Augustus de Morgan

Abstract

“DE MORGAN is certainly no commonplace man.” Whenever we read this sentence in Crabb Robinson's Diary we wonder how so acute an observer could have penned it. No one who has read the shortest article by De Morgan, or who has been in his company for however short a time, but would say that he was the very opposite of commonplace. Indeed the Diarist himself elsewhere records “De Morgan called. He is the only man whose calls, even when interruptions, are always acceptable. He has such luminous qualities, even in his small talk.” This last testimony all who knew De Morgan will accept as true. Though nearly twelve years have passed away since the death of this eminent mathematician and logician, no account, so far as we know, has been given of his life and writings, save the appreciative notice by the late Prof. W. Stanley Jevons—whose writings so amply testify to the influence De Morgan's teaching exercised over him—in the present issue of the Encyclopœdia Britannica (vol. vii. pp. 64-67, 1877), and the interesting sketch by Mr. Ranyard in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for February 9, 1872, vol. xxxii. (erroneously cited as vol. xxii. in Jevons's article). It was, however, well known that a “life” was being drawn up by Mrs. De Morgan. This is the work now before us, in the preface to which the writer says, “my object has been to supply that part of my husband's life, the material for which would not be within the reach of another biographer.”

Memoir of Augustus de Morgan.

By his Wife, Sophia Elizabeth de Morgan. With Selections from his Letters. (London: Longmans, 1882.)