Arthur Cayley

Abstract

Arthur Cayley (1821-1895) was the leading English pure mathematician of his generation. In 1883, he was the Sadleirian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a post he has held since it had been created twenty years before as part of a programme of reforms at the University. He was the pre-eminent pure mathematician in Britain, one of the few with an international reputation, and a prolific writer. He had been partly brought up in the English business community in St. Petersburg, which helps explain his very good French (he published several articles in french in French journals). His main interests were in algebra and geometry, especially invariant theory and algebraic and projective geometry, but he published on many other branches of mathematics, and was responsible for introducing many mathematical ideas in vogue in Continental Europe to Britain.