Henry Parker Manning

Born in Woodstock, Connecticut, on October 3, 1859, he graduated from Brown University in 1883 after earning several academic prizes in mathematics and natural philosophy. After teaching in New York, Maryland, and West Virginia, he entered Johns Hopkins University and completed his Ph.D. in 1891.

That same year he joined Brown’s mathematics faculty, where he became known for expanding the university’s advanced offerings. His books included Non-Euclidean Geometry (1901), described by Brown as the first English-language text on the subject, along with Irrational Numbers and their Representation by Sequences and Series (1906) and Geometry of Four Dimensions (1914).

He retired in 1930 and later served as an associate editor of the American Mathematical Monthly. Brown’s memorial notice remembered him as a gentle, wide-ranging scholar who preferred to teach from great original works rather than rely only on standard textbooks; late in life, he even studied early Egyptian hieroglyphics and collaborated on work connected to the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. He died in Providence on January 11, 1956, at age 96.