Sydney Samuel Hough

Sydney Samuel Hough (1870 to 1923) was a British applied mathematician and astronomer. Educated at Christ's Hospital, he won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, graduated in 1892, and was a Fellow of the college from 1895 to 1901. In 1898 he went to the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope as chief assistant to David Gill, where his strength in applied mathematics made up for limited practical experience of observing. He became director in 1907 and held the post until his death. He completed Gill's programme and compiled five of the twelve volumes of the southern African part of the Carte du Ciel, measuring the positions of more than 20,000 stars with high accuracy. His mathematical work was mainly on the theory of tides. He won the William Hopkins Prize in 1900, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1902, and in 1908 became the first president of the Royal Society of South Africa.