Norman Macleod Ferrers

Norman Macleod Ferrers (1829 to 1903) was a British mathematician, university administrator and editor of a mathematical journal. Educated at Eton College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he was Senior Wrangler in 1851, became a Fellow of the college in 1852, was called to the bar in 1855 and ordained in 1859 and 1860. He became Master of the college in 1880 and served as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University from 1884 to 1885. With J. J. Sylvester he edited The Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, and he assembled the papers of George Green for publication in 1871. His treatises include trilinear co-ordinates in 1861 and spherical harmonics in 1877. He is associated with the Ferrers diagram, a way of arranging the partition of a natural number as rows of dots, and he first suggested extending the equations of motion to nonholonomic constraints.