This article lists fellows of the Royal Society elected in 1839. [1]
James Joseph Sylvester was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was a professor at Oxford University.
William Henry Young FRS was an English mathematician. Young was educated at City of London School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He worked on measure theory, Fourier series, differential calculus, amongst other fields, and made contributions to the study of functions of several complex variables. He was the husband of Grace Chisholm Young, with whom he authored and co-authored 214 papers and 4 books. Two of their children became professional mathematicians. Young's Theorem was named after him.
The Sylvester Medal is a bronze medal awarded by the Royal Society (London) for the encouragement of mathematical research, and accompanied by a £1,000 prize. It was named in honour of James Joseph Sylvester, the Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford in the 1880s, and first awarded in 1901, having been suggested by a group of Sylvester's friends after his death in 1897. Initially awarded every three years with a prize of around £900, the Royal Society have announced that starting in 2009 it will be awarded every two years instead, and is to be aimed at 'early to mid career stage scientist' rather than an established mathematician. The award winner is chosen by the Society's A-side awards committee, which handles physical rather than biological science awards.
Dom George Frederick James Temple FRS OSB was an English mathematician, recipient of the Sylvester Medal in 1969. He was President of the London Mathematical Society in the years 1951–1953.
Félix Savart was a French physicist and mathematician who is primarily known for the Biot–Savart law of electromagnetism, which he discovered together with his colleague Jean-Baptiste Biot. His main interest was in acoustics and the study of vibrating bodies. A particular interest in the violin led him to create an experimental trapezoidal model. He gave his name to the savart, a unit of measurement for musical intervals, and to Savart's wheel—a device he used while investigating the range of human hearing.
Edmund Frederick Robertson is a professor emeritus of pure mathematics at the University of St Andrews.
William Arthur FRSE MC was a Scottish mathematician.