George Salmon

George Salmon FBA FRS FRSE (25 September 1819 – 22 January 1904) was a distinguished and influential Irish mathematician and Anglican theologian. After working in algebraic geometry for two decades, Salmon devoted the last forty years of his life to theology. His entire career was spent at Trinity College Dublin, having served as the 32nd Provost of the university from 1888 to 1904.

Salmon was born in Cork in 1819, to Michael Salmon and Helen Weekes (the daughter of the Reverend Edward Weekes). During his boyhood in Cork, where his father Michael was a linen merchant, he attended Hamblin and Porter's School there before starting at Trinity College Dublin in 1833.

In 1837, he won a scholarship and graduated from Trinity in 1839 with first-class honours in mathematics. In 1841, at the age of 21, he attained a paid fellowship and teaching position in mathematics at Trinity. In 1845, he was additionally appointed to a position in theology at the university, after having been ordained a deacon in 1844 and a priest in the Church of Ireland in 1845.

He remained at Trinity for the rest of his career.

He died at the Provost's House on 22 January 1904 and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin. He was an avid reader throughout his life, and his obituary refers to him as "specially devoted to the novels of Jane Austen."

In 1844, he married Frances Anne Salvador, daughter of Rev J L Salvador of Staunton-upon-Wye in Herefordshire, with whom he had six children, of whom only two survived him.

In the late 1840s and the 1850s, Salmon was in regular and frequent communication with Arthur Cayley and J. J. Sylvester. The three of them, together with a small number of other mathematicians (including Charles Hermite), were developing a system for dealing with n-dimensional algebra and geometry. During this period Salmon published about 36 papers in journals. In these papers for the most part he solved narrowly defined, concrete problems in algebraic geometry, as opposed to more broadly systematic or foundational questions. But he was an early adopter of the foundational innovations of Cayley and the others. In 1859, he published the book Lessons Introductory to the Modern Higher Algebra (where the word "higher" means n-dimensional). This was for a while simultaneously the state-of-the-art and the standard presentation of the subject, and went through updated and expanded editions in 1866, 1876 and 1885, and was translated into German and French.

From 1858 to 1867, he was the Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics at Trinity.