Arthur Cayley Quotes

Arthur Cayley was born in Richmond, London, England. He was a British mathematician. He helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in Greek, French, German, and Italian, as well as mathematics. He worked as a lawyer for 14 years. He postulated the Cayley–Hamilton theorem—that every square matrix is a root of its own characteristic polynomial, and verified it for matrices of order 2 and 3. He was the first to define the concept of a group in the modern way—as a set with a binary operation satisfying certain laws. Formerly, when mathematicians spoke of "groups", they had meant permutation groups. Cayley's theorem is named in honour of Cayley. He finished his undergraduate course by winning the place of Senior Wrangler, and the first Smith's prize. His next step was to take the M.A. degree, and win a Fellowship by competitive examination. In 1876 he published a Treatise on Elliptic Functions, which was his only book. In 1863 he was appointed first Sadlerian professor of mathematics at Cambridge.