Andrew Forsyth

Forsyth was born in Glasgow on 18 June 1858, the son of John Forsyth, a marine engineer, and his wife Christina Glen.[4]

Forsyth studied at Liverpool College and was tutored by Richard Pendlebury before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating senior wrangler in 1881.[5] He was elected a fellow of Trinity and then appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Liverpool at the age of 24. He returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1884 and became Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1895.[6]

Forsyth was forced to resign his chair in 1910 as a result of a scandal caused by his affair with Marion Amelia Boys, née Pollock, the wife of physicist C. V. Boys. Boys was granted a divorce on the grounds of Marion's adultery with Forsyth. Marion and Andrew Forsyth were later married.[7]

Forsyth became professor at the Imperial College of Science in 1913 and retired in 1923, remaining mathematically active into his seventies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886[1] and won its Royal Medal in 1897. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1908 at Rome.[8]

He is now remembered much more as an author of treatises than as an original researcher. His books have, however, often been criticized (for example by J. E. Littlewood, in his A Mathematician's Miscellany).[9] E. T. Whittaker was his only official student.[3]

Forsyth's urn at Golders Green Crematorium

He died in London on 2 June 1942 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.[4]

Forsyth received the degree of Doctor mathematicae (honoris causa) from the Royal Frederick University on 6 September 1902, when they celebrated the centennial of the birth of mathematician Niels Henrik Abel.[10][11]

Forsyth married Marion Amelia Pollock in 1910.[1]

• A Treatise on Differential Equations (1885)
  • translated into German as Lehrbuch der Differentialgleichungen (1912)[12]
• Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable (1893)[13]
• Geodesics on an oblate spheroid(1895–96)
• Theory of Differential Equations (1890–1906) six volumes[14]
• Lectures on the Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces (1912)
• Lectures Introductory to the Theory of Functions of Two Complex Variables(1914)[15]
• Solutions of the Examples in a Treatise on Differential Equations (1918)[16]
• Calculus of Variations (1927)[17][18]
• Geometry of Four Dimensions (1930)[19]
• Intrinsic Geometry of Ideal Space (1935)[20] vol. 1 vol. 2

• Laguerre–Forsyth invariant

• Royal Society obituary
• Andrew Russell Forsyth by Leonard Roth