Alex. (Alexander) McAulay

Born in Luton, England, on 9 November 1863, he studied at Kingswood School, Owens College in Manchester, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his growing fascination with mathematics took hold. He moved to Australia in 1888, taught at Ormond College in Melbourne, and in 1896 became the first professor of mathematics and physics at the newly established University of Tasmania.

He is best remembered for his passionate advocacy of quaternions, a mathematical system he believed was deeply useful for physics. He published works including Utility of Quaternions in Physics and Octonions: A Development of Clifford's Biquaternions, contributed the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on quaternions, and later wrote on relativity as well. Beyond pure theory, he also worked on a magnetic survey of Tasmania and compiled a compact book of logarithmic tables that remained useful to scientists and engineers for decades.

In his later years, failing eyesight made research harder, but he kept adapting and even modified Braille to handle complex mathematical notation. He died in Hobart, Tasmania, on 5 July 1931, leaving a legacy tied both to Australian university life and to an unusually determined vision of mathematics in science.