Henry Frederick Baker

Henry Frederick Baker (1866 to 1956) was an English mathematician who spent his whole life in Cambridge, where he was born, studied and taught. The son of a domestic butler, he rose through Perse School and St John's College to become Senior Wrangler in 1887 and a Fellow of his college two years later. He held the Cayley Lectureship from 1903 and then the Lowndean Chair of Astronomy and Geometry from 1914 until he retired in 1936. Inspired by Felix Klein during a visit to Gottingen, he wrote Abel's Theorem and the Allied Theory of Theta Functions in 1897 and Multiply Periodic Functions in 1907, and later the six volume Principles of Geometry. He also edited the collected papers of James Joseph Sylvester. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1898, he won its Sylvester Medal in 1910, and he founded the Saturday afternoon geometry seminar that shaped a younger generation of Cambridge geometers.