by Anita McConnell
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Vince, Samuel (1749-1821), mathematician and astronomer, was born at Fressingfield, Suffolk, on 6 April 1749, the youngest son of John Vince, a bricklayer, and his wife, Ann. He worked with his father until he was about twelve, when the Revd Warnes noticed him sitting reading beside his hod. Warnes lent him books and eventually sent him to Mr Tilney's school at Harleston, Norfolk, where he acted as assistant teacher. In 1768 Vince's early competence in mathematics allowed him to propose one, and answer ten, of the serious mathematical problems regularly set in the Ladies' Diary. With financial help from Dr Samuel Cooper of Great Yarmouth, he briefly attended St Paul's School, London, from where in 1771 he was admitted sizar at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he graduated in 1775 as senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman. He was a member of the Hyson Club, established by the wranglers of 1757. His contemporary Gilbert Wakefield recalled Vince as 'an accomplished mathematician [and] an amiable man ... rewarded with no preferment adequate to his reasonable pretentions' (Memoirs of the Life, 137). Vince migrated to Sidney Sussex College, where he proceeded MA in 1778; he continued to reside at least partly in Cambridge.
In 1780 Vince married Mary, daughter of Thomas Paris; she survived him, with their only child, Samuel Berney Vince (1781-1845), later vicar of Ringwood, Hampshire. Having taken orders, Vince was presented in 1784 to the rectory of Kirby Bedon, Norfolk, which he occupied for two years before handing over to a curate and moving to the vicarage of South Creak, Norfolk, in 1786. He was presented to the prebend of Melton Ross with Scamblesby, Lincolnshire, in 1803, and in 1809 to the archdeaconry of Bedford.
During these years Vince published books of a religious nature and others dealing with astronomy and mathematics. He was one of the last representatives of the English synthetical school. His textbooks were used in the university and ran through several editions. He also communicated several papers to the Royal Society: the first to be published, 'An investigation of the principle of progressive and rotatory motion' (PTRS, 70, 1780, 546-77), gained him the society's Copley medal. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society on 22 June 1786. He followed with a series of papers on the summation of infinite series, and delivered several Bakerian lectures: between 1794 and 1797 on aspects of fluid rotation and of bodies rotating in fluids, in 1798 on an unusual horizontal refraction of the air, and in 1804 on the hypotheses of gravitation. He contributed the last volume, dealing with fluxions, hydrostatics, and astronomy, to James Wood's four-volume digest of university lectures entitled The Principles of Mathematical and Natural Philosophy (1793-9).
On the death of Anthony Shepherd (1721-1796), Vince was appointed to succeed him as Plumian professor of astronomy and experimental philosophy at Cambridge, and he held the post until his death. His masterly and best-known work, A Complete System of Astronomy (3 vols., 1797-1808), appeared in a second enlarged edition in 1814-23. Professor John Playfair asserted in the Edinburgh Review of June 1809 that the tables collected in the third volume marked 'a great epoch in astronomical science'. At some time prior to 1811 Vince retired to Ramsgate, Kent, where he died on 28 November 1821.
ANITA MCCONNELL
Sources
J. Venn and others, eds., Biographical history of Gonville and Caius College, 2: 1713-1897 (1898), 90
Memoirs of the life of Gilbert Wakefield, ed. J. T. Rutt and A. Wainewright, 2 vols. (1804), vol. 1, p. 137
E. H. Kinder, Kirby Bedon (1924)
Cambridge Chronicle and Journal (7 Dec 1821), 3b
GM, 1st ser., 87/2 (1817)
'Athenae Suffolkensis', BL, Add. MS 19167, fol. 201
W. Beloe, The sexagenarian, or, The recollections of a literary life, ed. [T. Rennell], 1 (1817), 38
GM, 1st ser., 91/2 (1821), 643
N&Q, 9th ser., 4 (4 Nov 1899)
will, PRO, PROB 11/1651, sig. 695
Report on the adjudication of the Copley, Romford and Royal medals, and appointment of the Bakerian, Croonian and Fairchild lecturers (1834)
Archives
CUL, corresp., treatises, and notes | RAS, letters to William Herschel
Likenesses
R. Cooper, stipple, pubd 1821 (after drawing by T. Wageman, 1821), BM, NPG
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