Alexander Macfarlane

author

Alexander Macfarlane

1851–1913

A Scottish-born mathematician and physicist, he helped bridge logic, physics, and the emerging language of modern algebra. His career carried him from Edinburgh to Texas and Lehigh, and his later writings became valued portraits of 19th-century British mathematics.

2 Audiobooks

Vector Analysis and Quaternions

Vector Analysis and Quaternions

by Alexander Macfarlane

Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century

Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century

by Alexander Macfarlane

About the author

Born in Blairgowrie, Scotland, on April 21, 1851, Alexander Macfarlane was a logician, physicist, and mathematician whose work moved between experimental science and abstract mathematics. He studied at the University of Edinburgh under Peter Guthrie Tait, and early in his career served there as a student, instructor, and examiner before building a wider academic life abroad.

Macfarlane taught physics at the University of Texas and later lectured in electrical engineering and mathematical physics at Lehigh University. He is especially associated with work on quaternions and related algebraic systems, and with the Quaternion Association, a group formed to promote that field of study.

He is also remembered as a graceful historian of mathematics. MacTutor notes that his two posthumously published books on 19th-century British mathematicians are among the works for which he is best known, in part because he had personally known many of the figures he described. He died in Chatham, Ontario, on August 28, 1913.