Merrifield, Charles Watkins

(1827-1884), mathematician

by Adrian Rice

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Merrifield, Charles Watkins (1827-1884), mathematician, was born on 20 October 1827 at Nelson Square, Southwark, London, the son of John Merrifield (1788/9-1877), barrister, formerly of Tavistock, Devon, and his wife, Mary Philadelphia, née Watkins (1804-1889) [see Merrifield, Mary Philadelphia], a writer on art and literature. After receiving a good general education he entered the education department in 1847 at Whitehall, and was subsequently appointed an examiner, a post he held to within a few months of his death. Although called to the bar in January 1851, he did not practise. He devoted his leisure time to mathematics, and especially to naval architecture, amassing an extensive knowledge of applied mechanics and hydraulics. On 12 October 1858 he married Elizabeth Ellen, daughter of John Nicholls of Trekenning, St Colomb; she died on 23 March 1869 at their home, 23 Scarsdale Villas, South Kensington.

In 1858 Merrifield published a paper 'The geometry of the elliptic equation' in the Philosophical Magazine, which revealed remarkable mathematical ability. Important papers on the calculation of elliptic functions followed, resulting in his election on 4 June 1863 as a fellow of the Royal Society. On 19 March 1866 he was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society, becoming a member of its council on 10 November 1870, vice-president (1876-8), president (1878-80), and treasurer from November 1880 until his resignation, due to ill health, on 14 December 1882.

On the establishment in 1867 of the Royal School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at South Kensington, Merrifield accepted the office of vice-principal at the request of the authorities, succeeding shortly afterwards to the post of principal. He held this office until 1873, when, on the transference of the school to Greenwich, he returned to the education office. From 1864 to 1875 Merrifield was member and secretary of the Institution of Naval Architects, from which he received a handsome testimonial on his retirement.

He was also a member of the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching, and he sat on many committees of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, being president of section G (on mechanical science) at the Brighton meeting of 1875 and at the Glasgow meeting of 1876. In his presidential address of 1876 he stressed the importance of practical education, urging more language and less grammar, more drawing and less geometry, or, as he himself put it, 'more marching and less drill' (PRS). He served on various commissions, including the royal commission on the unseaworthiness of ships in 1869, and the royal commission which reported on Charles Babbage's famous analytical engine. He frequently acted as assessor in the wreck commissioner's court, and was superintendent of the naval museum at South Kensington.

Merrifield was a frequent contributor to mathematical journals, although few of his papers were of any great length. More than a hundred were published in the Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, with other papers appearing in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, the Assurance Magazine, British Association Reports, and the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. For many years he also edited Longman's Text-books of Science series, contributing his own Technical Arithmetic and Mensuration in 1870.

Merrifield's particular skill lay in mathematical arithmetic, methods of interpolation and tabular work in general, talents which he fully exploited by producing extended mathematical tables to reduce the amount of manual calculation required for particular mathematical applications. Thus it was largely to Merrifield that the revolution from 'rule of thumb' to exact science in naval architecture was attributed by his mathematical peers.

In addition to his scientific attainments, Merrifield was well versed in Latin and Greek, and was also able to write and speak French and Italian fluently. Some of his papers on the difficult and scientifically interesting subject of sea-waves were translated into Italian for the Revista Marittima, in which they appeared with a footnote from the editor bearing testimony to the author's extensive knowledge and excellence of style. Merrifield recovered from an attack of apoplexy in April 1882, but on 18 October 1883 suffered another attack; he died at his home, 45 Church Road, Hove, Sussex, on 1 January 1884, aged fifty-six.

ADRIAN RICE

Sources  
PRS, 36 (1883-4), i-iii
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1st ser., 15 (1883-4), 281-4
Nature, 29 (1883-4), 270
Boase & Courtney, Bibl. Corn., 1.350
G. C. Boase, Collectanea Cornubiensia: a collection of biographical and topographical notes relating to the county of Cornwall (1890)
The Times (4 Jan 1884), 6c
The Athenaeum (5 Jan 1884), 25

Archives  
CUL, letters to Sir George Stokes

Likenesses  
photograph, Sci. Mus.

Wealth at death  
£2302 17s. 10d.: probate, 4 Feb 1884, CGPLA Eng. & Wales


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