Andrew Forsyth

Andrew Russell Forsyth was a British mathematician, born in Glasgow on 18 June 1858, the son of the marine engineer John Forsyth. He studied at Liverpool College and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating senior wrangler in 1881, and he was elected a fellow of Trinity and 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, but he was forced to resign his chair in 1910 after a scandal and became professor at the Imperial College of Science in 1913, retiring in 1923. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886 and won its Royal Medal in 1897. He is remembered more as an author of treatises, including A Treatise on Differential Equations and Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable, than as an original researcher, and his only official student was E. T. Whittaker. He died in London on 2 June 1942.