The History of Mathematics: A Brief Course

6. AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND 71

Tasmania, 1890). In New Zealand universities opened at Dunedin (University of

Otago, 1869), Christchurch (University of Canterbury, 1873), Auckland (1883), and

Wellington (Victoria University, 1897). The New Zealand universities were from

the beginning co-educational. The Australian Mathematical Society was founded in

1956 and the New Zealand Mathematical Society in 1974. Long before that, how-

ever, good mathematicians were being born and working in these two countries.

The following short list is far from complete, but it does show that world-class

mathematics and science have been produced in this region almost from the begin-

ning.

The Bragg family. In 1915 two Australians, father and son, were awarded the Nobel

Prize for physics. Each of them served as director of the Royal Institution in

London. William Henry Bragg (1862-1942) was a professor of mathematics at the

University of Adelaide from 1885 to 1908. His son William Lawrence Bragg (1890-

1971) became Cavendish Professor of physics at Cambridge and director of the

National Physical Laboratory.

Horatio Scott Carslaw. One of the standard texts on Fourier series, which was

reprinted many times and eventually became immortalized in a Dover edition, was

written by H. S. Carslaw (1870-1954), the third professor of mathematics at the

University of Sydney (1903 1935). Carslaw was born in Scotland but moved to

Australia in 1903 to take up the position at the University of Sydney. Besides his

book on Fourier series, he also collaborated on a standard textbook on the Laplace

transform and had an interest in the history of logarithms.

Thomas Gerald Room. Carslaw's successor at the University of Sydney was Thomas

Gerald Room (1902-1986), a native of London who, like Carslaw, moved to Aus-

tralia to take up an academic position. He is well remembered by combinatoricists

for the concept of Room squares, about which he published a paper in 1955.

Ernest Rutherford. Another physicist with mathematical gifts was the New Zealan-

der Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), who studied at Canterbury University, worked

at McGill University in Montreal (1898-1907), and eventually, working at Manch-

ester University, performed a famous experiment that helped to determine the struc-

ture of the atom (the positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that is

still the popular picture of atoms).

V. F. R. Jones. One of the brightest stars in the mathematical firmament at the

moment is Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones (b. 1952), who graduated from the

University of Auckland in 1973. From there he went to Switzerland, where he

received the doctoral degree for a prize-winning dissertation. Since 1980 he has

worked in the United States. He won the Fields Medal in 1990 for his ground-

breaking work in knot theory. (The Jones polynomial is named after him.) This

discovery came about while he was working in a seemingly unrelated area (von

Neumann algebras) and had links to areas of mathematical physics (topological

quantum field theories) that were studied by mathematical physicists such as the

American Edward Witten (b. 1951) and the British topologist Simon Donaldson

(b. 1957), both of whom also won the Fields Medal, Donaldson in 1986 and Witten

alongside Jones in 1990. The Jones polynomial was described by the French journal

La recherche in its issue of July-August 1997 as one of the 300 most important

discoveries of the last three centuries.