“G. B. M.”

Abstract

I FIRST saw the late G. B. Mathews on June 4, 1884, at the Queen's Hotel, Chester, when the staff of the newly founded University College of North Wales was appointed. He was chosen for the Chair of Mathematics, and almost from that time we were linked together in friendship as well as in our offices as teachers of intimately related subjects in the same institution. I well remember his youthful and striking yet attractive appearance. He was the senior wrangler of the previous year, and came full of eager enthusiasm for the teaching of mathematics and for original mathematical work, and for ten years laboured hard in the hope of founding something like a school of mathematical study in North Wales. But alas ! these hopes were dashed. Perhaps he was a little impatient, and I certainly did my best to counsel him to wait, and to find out the effect of the new Welsh university on the studies of the place, but without effect. The best of the Welsh students were at that time attracted by the Neo-Hegelian philosophy, and some of them, as seems to be the way of such students, seemed not a little proud that their mental tendencies were not mathematical. To this curious type of intellectual pride Mathews referred eloquently in the posthumous paper published in NATURE of April 22.