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William Burnside
1852–1927
Best known for helping shape modern group theory, this English mathematician gave his name to Burnside's lemma and wrote one of the early major books on finite groups. He taught for many years at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and later held a chair at the University of Oxford.
1 Audiobook
Theory of Groups of Finite Order
by William Burnside
About the author
Born in London on July 2, 1852, William Burnside studied at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Pembroke College. He built a reputation as a gifted pure mathematician at a time when group theory was still taking shape.
Much of his work focused on finite groups, and his book Theory of Groups of Finite Order became a landmark text for later mathematicians. His name is also attached to Burnside's lemma, a widely taught counting result, and to the Burnside problem, which inspired major later developments in algebra.
Burnside spent most of his career teaching at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich before becoming Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Oxford. He died on August 21, 1927, and is remembered as one of the key early figures in the development of modern algebra.