Thomas Archer Hirst - Life

Life

Thomas Hirst was born in Heckmondwike, Yorkshire, England, where both his parents came from families in the wool trade. He was the youngest of four sons. The family moved to Wakefield so that the boys could attend a better school. He left school at fifteen to work as an apprentice engineer in Halifax, surveying for proposed railway lines. It was there that he met John Tyndall, ten years older than Hirst and working as an engineer in the same firm.

In his late teens, at the instigation of Tyndall, Hirst decided to go to Germany for education, initially in chemistry. He eventually received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Marburg in 1852 (tutor: Friedrich Ludwig Stegmann). In 1853, he attended geometry lectures by Jakob Steiner at University of Berlin. Hirst married Anna Martin in 1854, and spent much of the decade of the 1850s on the European continent, where he socialized with many mathematicians, and used his inherited wealth to support himself.

From 1860 to 1864, Hirst taught at University College School but resigned because he wanted more time for his mathematical research. He was appointed Professor of Physics at University College London in 1865, and he succeeded Augustus de Morgan to the Chair of Mathematics at UCL in 1867. In 1873 he was appointed Director of Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich

In Britain from the 1860s onwards, Hirst also allocated much of his time to the administrative committees of British science. He was an active member of the governing councils of the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the London Mathematical Society. He was the founding president of an association to reform school mathematics curricula, and worked for the education of women. Alongside his old friend Tyndall, Hirst was a member of T.H.Huxley’s London X-Club. He died in London in 1892, four weeks after he made the last entry in his journal.