Abstract
The Sylvester Medal is an award made by the Royal Society ‘for the encouragement of mathematical research irrespective of nationality, and not confined to pure mathematical research’. It was instituted in memory of the Jewish mathematician James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897), soon after his death. The Jewish community took the initiative, forming a committee chaired by Lord Rothschild and including the mathematicians A.R. Forsyth, A.G. Greenhill and O. Henrici. The work fell upon the organizing secretary, who was the chemist and biologist Raphael Meldola, F.R.S., Professor at Finsbury Technical College. Fund-raising was pursued in both Britain and the USA, for Sylvester had taught there for two periods: in rather turbulent circumstances at the University of Virginia for three months in 1841-43, and with greater success (including founding the American Journal of Mathematics ) at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 to 1883. His first doctoral student there, G.B. Halsted, was one of the organizing secretaries for the USA; the other was the Jewish leader and educational administrator Cyrus Adler, then at the Smithsonian Institution having spent some years at Johns Hopkins just after Sylvester’s time there.
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