Rogers, Leonard James

(1862-1933), mathematician

by T. Chaundy, rev. Anita McConnell

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Rogers, Leonard James (1862-1933), mathematician, was born at Oxford on 30 March 1862, the second of the five sons of James Edwin Thorold Rogers (1823-1890) and his second wife, Anne Susanna Charlotte, daughter of Henry Revell Reynolds, solicitor to the Treasury. He was the brother of Annie Rogers. Because of illness he was educated privately, entering Balliol College, Oxford in 1880. Besides gaining a first class in mathematical moderations (1881) and in the final school of mathematics (1884), together with both the junior and senior university mathematical scholarships (1881, 1885), he also obtained a second class in classical moderations in 1882 and two years later graduated BMus. In 1888 he became professor of mathematics at the Yorkshire College, afterwards the University of Leeds, where he remained until illness forced his retirement in 1919.

Rogers recovered sufficiently to serve on the council of the London Mathematical Society in 1901 and was elected FRS in 1924. He was unmarried. His abilities were many and his interests diverse, and he was a musician of uncommon skill with a faultless ear and a tenacious memory: he was a good pianist, and took part in choral music at both Leeds and Oxford. So necessary was music to him that in 1917, bed-ridden and paralysed, he taught himself to play the concertina, the only instrument then possible to him. He was also a ready linguist and an engaging mimic, especially of broad Yorkshire, a first-class skater, an excellent knitter, and an amateur of rock-gardens.

Rogers's mathematical work was published in the form of articles; he did not write a book. His first work was in the theory of reciprocants, that is of differential expressions unaltered by specified transformations of the variables, but subsequently his chief work and interest lay in the associated fields of elliptic functions, theta functions, and basic hypergeometric series, called shortly q-series. Here his work crossed that of the remarkable Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and it was to the circumstances of this interconnection that Rogers owed a good deal of his fame and recognition as a mathematician. Ramanujan in 1913 had presented two propositions which neither he, in his later years at Cambridge, nor Dr P. A. MacMahon, the leading English authority on the subject, could prove. It was only later and by accident that Ramanujan himself discovered that Rogers had already proved and published them nineteen years before, as particular cases of more general theorems.

Rogers seemed strikingly unprofessional even among English mathematicians; he cared much for particular problems in mathematics and their solution, just as he cared for individual species in his rock-garden--that is, if they were sufficiently beautiful--but a full corpus of mathematical theory interested him as little as botany after Linnaeus. He was probably better read as a musician than as a mathematician, and undoubtedly reckoned mathematics among the fine arts rather than with the sciences. Of his personal charm, his grace of manner, the wit and sparkle of his conversation, his friends were gratefully aware, and it is perhaps his greatest distinction to have spent freely on them what a harsher economy would have wished to conserve for posterity.

After retiring from Leeds, Rogers returned to Oxford, where he remained free of official appointments. He died in the Acland Nursing Home, Oxford, on 12 September 1933.

T. CHAUNDY, rev. ANITA MCCONNELL

Sources  
A. L. D., Obits. FRS, 1 (1932-5), 299-301
Nature, 132 (1933), 701
The Times (14 Sept 1933)
The Times (16 Sept 1933)
The Times (26 Sept 1933)
personal knowledge (1949)
private information (1949)
b. cert.
d. cert.

Likenesses  
W. Stoneman, two photographs, 1921-33, NPG
photograph, repro. in A. L. D., Obits. FRS

Wealth at death  
£24,157 17s. 4d.: probate, 3 Nov 1933, CGPLA Eng. & Wales


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