George Salmon

George Salmon was a distinguished and influential Irish mathematician and Anglican theologian, born in Cork on 25 September 1819, the son of a linen merchant. After working in algebraic geometry for two decades, he devoted the last forty years of his life to theology. His entire career was spent at Trinity College Dublin, where he started in 1833, won a scholarship in 1837 and graduated 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 there, and in 1845 he was additionally appointed to a position in theology after being ordained a deacon in 1844 and a priest in the Church of Ireland in 1845. In 1848 he published an undergraduate textbook, A Treatise on Conic Sections. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1863, received its Royal Medal in 1868 and its Copley Medal in 1889, and served as the 32nd Provost of the university from 1888 to 1904.