Edward Waring

Edward Waring was a British mathematician of the eighteenth century who became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1760. Educated at Shrewsbury School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1757 and was elected a fellow of the college the next year. His Miscellanea Analytica, published in full in 1762, deals mainly with the theory of numbers and algebraic equations, and his Meditationes Algebraicae of 1770 reworked and expanded it. He made the assertion known as Waring's problem without proof, and the later work also contains the so-called Goldbach conjecture. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1763, received its Copley Medal in 1784, and took a medical degree in 1767. He held the Cambridge chair until his death in 1798.