Ferrers, Norman Macleod

(1829-1903), mathematician and university administrator

by John Venn, rev. Anita McConnell

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Ferrers, Norman Macleod (1829-1903), mathematician and university administrator, was born on 11 August 1829 at Prinknash Park, Upton St Leonards, Gloucestershire, the only child of Thomas Bromfield Ferrers (1794-1849), stockbroker, of London, and his wife, Lavinia, daughter of Alexander Macleod of Harris. He was educated at Eton College (1844-6), followed by a year as a private pupil in the house of the mathematician Harvey Goodwin, then vicar of St Edward's, Cambridge, afterwards bishop of Carlisle. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, on 6 March 1847, and graduated BA in 1851 as senior wrangler of his year, being also first Smith's prizeman; he proceeded MA in 1854. He was elected fellow of his college in 1852 and immediately afterwards went to London to study law. He was called to the bar, as a member of Lincoln's Inn, in 1855, returned to Cambridge, and took orders. He was ordained deacon in 1859 and priest in 1860.

In 1856 Ferrers, who was by far the best mathematician among the fellows, was invited to fill the post of mathematical lecturer. His career was thus determined for the rest of his life. For many years head mathematical lecturer, he was one of the two tutors of Caius from 1865. He was probably the best lecturer, in his subject, in the university of his day; besides great natural powers in mathematics, he possessed an unusual capacity for vivid exposition.

After his marriage, on 3 April 1866, to Emily, daughter of John Lamb, dean of Bristol and master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Ferrers lived first at Hills Road, Cambridge, then at Brookside, where his family of four sons and a daughter were born. Ferrers's chief recreation was walking in Switzerland and in Britain, where he climbed the more easily accessible peaks. On 27 October 1880 he was elected master of Caius. He was admitted to the degree of DD on 7 June 1881, and an honorary degree of LLD was conferred on him by the University of Glasgow in 1883.

In his early days Ferrers was a keen university reformer, within the limits of the time. For more than twenty years he was a member of the council of the senate at Cambridge: first elected in 1865, he was dropped the following year because his liberal ideas on admission of nonconformists to fellowships displeased the majority of electors. When the passing of the Test Act closed this controversy he was re-elected in 1872, and served continuously to 1892, when increasing infirmity obliged him to stand down. In the mathematical tripos he acted as moderator or examiner more often, it is believed, than any one else hitherto. In 1876 Ferrers was appointed a governor of St Paul's School, and in 1885 a governor of Eton College. He was elected FRS in 1877, and vice-chancellor of the university in 1884-5.

Ferrers held strongly the old view that a thorough training in mathematics was essential to a sound education. He cared little for such new subjects as natural science and mechanical engineering, and was slow to accept the principle that distinction in any subject which was recognized and taught in the university gave a valid claim to a scholarship or fellowship. It was as a mathematician that he acquired some fame outside Cambridge. He made many contributions of importance to mathematical literature. His Solutions of the Cambridge Senate House Problems, 1848-51 and his Trilinear Co-ordinates (1861, later edns, 1866 and 1876) were useful textbooks, the latter being the first exposition of this subject. One of his early memoirs was on Sylvester's development of Poinsot's representation of the motion of a rigid body about a fixed point. The paper was read before the Royal Society in 1869, and published in its Transactions. In 1871 he edited at the request of the college the mathematical writings of George Green (1793-1841), a former fellow of Caius. Ferrers's treatise Spherical Harmonics (1877) presented many original features.

Ferrers's contributions to the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, of which he was an editor from 1855 to 1891, were numerous, ranging over such subjects as quadriplanar co-ordinates, Lagrange's equations, and hydrodynamics. In his study of Kelvin's investigation of the law of distribution of electricity in equilibrium on an uninfluenced spherical bowl he made the important addition of finding the potential at any point of space in zonal harmonics (Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, 18, 1882, 83-92).

In 1879 Ferrers was troubled with the first symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis: this gradually increased until he was rendered severely disabled. He died at the master's lodge at Caius on 31 January 1903; his cremated remains were interred in the college chapel. He was survived by his wife.

JOHN VENN, rev. ANITA MCCONNELL

Sources  
E. J. R. [E. J. Routh], PRS, 75 (1905), 273-6
Venn, Alum. Cant.
personal knowledge (1912)
J. Venn and others, eds., Biographical history of Gonville and Caius College, 2: 1713-1897 (1898), 278
C. S. F. Ferrers, The Ferrers family history (1900), 45-6

Archives  
CUL, letters to Lord Kelvin
CUL, letters to Sir George Stokes
King's AC Cam., letters to Oscar Browning

Likenesses  
J. Collier, oils, 1885, Gon. & Caius Cam.
T. C. Wageman, watercolour drawing, Trinity Cam.

Wealth at death  
£22,757 12s. 3d.: resworn probate, Sept 1903, CGPLA Eng. & Wales


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