James Joseph Sylvester

James Joseph Sylvester was a mathematician born into a Jewish family; he grew up as James Joseph and added the surname Sylvester shortly before beginning his university studies. He took up law and became friends with Arthur Cayley, who was also training as a lawyer, and it was on walks together at the courts of Lincoln's Inn that Sylvester became interested in matrix theory. He became professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich after the first appointee to the chair died within a few months. His papers of 1852 and 1853 on the calculus of forms and on syzygetic relations are described by MacTutor as drawing on matrix theory in the study of higher dimensional geometry. In 1877 he accepted a chair at Johns Hopkins University, founded the American Journal of Mathematics in 1878 and supervised nine doctorates there in seven years.