John Radford Young

John Radford Young was an English mathematician, professor and author, born at Southwark on 8 April 1799 and dying at Peckham on 5 March 1885. Born of humble parents and almost entirely self-educated, he was noticed early by Olinthus Gilbert Gregory, who helped his studies. In 1823 he published An Elementary Treatise on Algebra, the first of a long series of elementary textbooks in which, following Robert Woodhouse, he introduced English students to continental methods of mathematical analysis. In 1833 he became Professor of Mathematics at Belfast College, but the Presbyterian party controlling the new Queen's College, Belfast, prevented his reappointment in 1849. He then devoted himself to analysis and made several original discoveries, among them a proof of Newton's rule for the number of imaginary roots of an equation, published in 1844 and completed in 1866. His papers appeared in the transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and the Royal Irish Academy.