George Chrystal

George Chrystal was a Scottish mathematician, born in 1851 at Old Meldrum near Aberdeen and dead in 1911 in Edinburgh. He graduated from Aberdeen in 1871 with first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy, went on to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and graduated in 1875 as second wrangler, placed equal with William Burnside. At Cambridge he worked in the Cavendish Laboratory under James Clerk Maxwell on the experimental verification of Ohm's law. In 1877 he was appointed to the Regius chair of mathematics at St Andrews and in 1879 he moved to the chair at Edinburgh, which he held for the rest of his career. He is best remembered for Algebra, a two volume textbook published in 1886 and 1889 that stressed the logic and form of the subject over example grinding. He was Dean of the Faculty of Arts, pressed for freer university curricula, and proposed the school Leaving Certificate examination in Scotland. In his last years he turned to the seiches of Scottish lakes, work that brought him the Gunning Victoria Award of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London.