Anniversary Meeting of the Royal Society and Newton Tercentenary Celebrations, 30 November 1942

Abstract

Before proceeding to the presentation of the Medals awarded for this year, it is fitting that, in accordance with custom, we should briefly recall the lives and the achievements of those whom death has removed from our Fellowship and our Foreign Membership since the last Anniversary Meeting of the Society. His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught, who died on 16 January at the advanced age of 91 years, was elected to our Fellowship under Statute 11 as long ago as 1906, so that he was by many years the senior of the members of the Royal Family who have accepted election to our Fellowship. His Royal Highness had other contacts with the advancement and the applications of scientific knowledge as President of the Royal Society of Arts, and of the Royal Colonial Institute. The latter appointment had a particular fitness in recognition of his many and great services to the British Commonwealth of Nations, as Governor-General of the Dominion of Canada and on other special missions. Emile Picard (1856-1941), perpetual secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences since 1917, had been a Foreign Member since 1909. He was one of the most famous of modern French mathematicians. He did work of fundamental importance in the theory of differential equations, the theory of algebraic functions of several variables, and the theory of surfaces and integrals associated with them; and ‘Picard’s theorem’ is one of the classical theorems of the theory of analytic functions.