TEANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 



Section A.— MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIEKCE. 



President of the Section.— Major P. A. MaoMahon, D.Sc, F.R.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12. 



The President delivered the following Address : 



During the seventy meetings of the Association a pure mathematician has been 

 president of Section A on ten or a dozen occasions. A theme taken by many has 

 been a defence of the study of pure mathematics. I take Oayley's view expressed 

 before thewhole Association at Southport in 1883 that no defence is necessary, 

 but were it otherwise I fe^l that nothing need be added to the eloquent words of 

 Sylvester m 1869 and of Forsyth in 1897. I intend therefore to make some re- 

 marks on several matters winch may be interesting to the Section even at the risk 

 of being considered undulv desultory. 



Before commencing l" must remVk that during the twelve months that have 

 elapsed since the Bradford Meeting we have lost several great men whose lives 

 were devoted to the subjects of this Section. Hermite, the veteran mathema- 

 tician of France, has left behind him a splendid record of purely scientific 

 work His name will be always connected with tlie Herculean achievement 

 ot solving the general quintic equation by means of elliptic modular func- 

 S-; ^l^^ "^v^ y less striking is equally of the highest order, and his 

 treatise ' Cours d Analyse is a model of style. Of FitzQerald of Dublin it 

 18 not easy to speak in this room without emotion. For many years he was 

 the hfe and soul of this Section. His enthusiasm in regard to all branches of 

 molecular physics, the force and profundity of his speech, the vigour of his advo- 

 cacy of particular theories, the acute thinking which enabled him to formulate 

 desiderata, his warm interest in the work of others, and the unselfish aid he was 

 so willing to give,_are fresh m our remembrance. Rowland was in the forefront of 

 the ranks of physicists. His death at a comparativelv early age terminates the 

 important series of discoveries which were proclaimed from his laboratory in the 

 Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore. In Viriamu Jones we have lost an 

 assiduous worker at physics whose valuable contributions to knowledge indicated 

 his power to do much more lor science. In Tait, Scotland possessed "^a powerful 

 and original investigator. The extant and variety of his! papers are alike remark- 

 fame' "' collected works there exists an imperishable monument to his 



It is iulerestin- in this the first year of the new ceuturv, to take a ranid 

 glance at the position that mathematicianslof this country held amongst mathe- 

 maticians a hundred years ago During the greater part of the eighteenth centurv 

 the study of mathematics in England, Scotland and Ireland had beer at a verv 

 low ebb. Whereas in 1801 on the Continent there were the leader? f^lc^-angj 

 Laplace and Legendre, and ot rising men, Fourier, Ampere, Poisson and Gauss, we 



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