James Joseph Sylvester - Jewish Mathematician in a Victorian World

Here, in this first biographical study of James Joseph Sylvester, Karen Hunger Parshall makes a signal contribution to the history of mathematics, Victorian history, and the history of science. A brilliant Cambridge student at first denied a degree because of his faith, Sylvester came twice to America to teach mathematics, ultimately becoming one of Daniel Coit Gilman's faculty recruits at Johns Hopkins in 1876 and winning the coveted Savilian Professorship of Geometry at Oxford in 1883.He held professorships of natural philosophy, worked as an actuary, was called to the bar, and taught mathematics to cadets training for engineering and artillery posts in the British Army.During his long, distinguished career he also edited England's Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics and established the American Journal of Mathematics, the first sustained mathematics research journal in the United States. Situating Sylvester's life within the political, religious, mathematical, and soci