# William Spottiswoode

William H. Spottiswoode FRS HFRSE LLD (11 January 1825 – 27 June 1883) was an English mathematician, physicist and partner in the printing and publishing firm Eyre & Spottiswoode. He was president of the Royal Society from 1878 to 1883.

## Biography
### Early life

Spottiswoode was born in London on 11 January 1825, the son of Andrew Spottiswoode and his wife, Mary Longman. His father was descended from an ancient Scottish family, represented Colchester in parliament for some years, and in 1831 became junior partner in the firm of Eyre & Spottiswoode, printers.
William was educated at Laleham Lea School, Eton College, and Harrow School. He then studied Mathematics and Physics at Balliol College, Oxford. His talent for science showed itself while he was still a schoolboy, and indeed his removal from Eton to Harrow is said to have been occasioned by an accidental explosion which occurred whilst he was performing an experiment for his own amusement. At Harrow he obtained a Lyon scholarship in 1842, and at Oxford in 1845 a first-class in mathematics, in 1846 the junior and in 1847 the senior university mathematical scholarship.

### Family

On 27 November 1861 at Bexley in Kent, he married Elisa ("Lise") Taylor Arbuthnot (1837–1894), daughter of William Urquhart Arbuthnot (son of Sir William Arbuthnot, 1st Baronet).
Their children included William Hugh Spottiswoode (1864–1915) and Cyril Andrew Spottiswoode (1867–1915).

## Career

In 1846 he left Oxford to take his father's place in the business, in which he was engaged until his death.
In 1847 Spottiswoode issued five pamphlets entitled Meditationes Analyticae, that explored complex mathematical ideas through analytic methods, particularly focusing on functions and calculus. These pamphlets, among other things, exhibited advanced mathematical analytics and solutions to complex equations that examined the behavior of mathematical functions more deeply and precisely. These were his first publications of original mathematical work. From then on, he published new research almost every year.
In 1856 Spottiswoode travelled in eastern Russia, and in 1860 in Croatia and Hungary; of the former expedition he has left a record, A Tarantasse Journey through Eastern Russia in the Autumn of 1856 (London, 1857).
In 1870 he was elected president of the London Mathematical Society. In 1871 he began to turn his attention to experimental physics, his earlier researches bearing upon the light polarization and his later work upon the electrical discharge in rarefied gases. He wrote a popular treatise on the former subject for the Nature Series in 1874. In 1878 he was elected president of the British Association and in the same year president of the Royal Society, of which he had been a fellow since 1853.
He died in London of typhoid fever on 27 June 1883 and was buried in the south transept of Westminster Abbey.
As a mathematician, he occupied himself with many branches of his favorite science, more especially with higher algebra, including the theory of determinants, with the general calculus of symbols, and with the application of analysis to geometry and mechanics.
The following brief review of his mathematical work is quoted from the obituary notice which appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (xxxviii. 34):
"The interesting series of communications on the contact of curves and surfaces which are contained in the Philosophical Transactions of 1862 and subsequent years would alone account for the high rank he obtained as a mathematician". ... "The mastery which he had obtained over the mathematical symbols was so complete that he never shrank from the use of expressions, however complicated nay, the more complicated they were the more he seemed to revel in them provided they did not sin against the ruling spirit of all his work — symmetry".
His papers, numbering over 100, were published principally in the Philosophical Transactions, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society and Crelle's Journal, and one or two in the Comptes Rendus of the Paris Academy; a list of them, arranged according to the several journals in which they originally appeared, with short notes upon the less familiar memoirs, is given in Nature, xxvii, 599.

## Publications

* Elementary Theorems Relating to Determinants. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longman. 1851. Retrieved October 22, 2013. OCLC 6652565 (all editions).
* A Tarantasse Journey Through Eastern Russia in the Autumn of 1856. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longman. 1857. Retrieved March 13, 2013. OCLC 2925190 (all editions).
* Lecture I: "Polarised Light". Science Lectures at South Kensington. Vol. 2 (of 2). London: Macmillan & Company. 1879. pp. 1–14. Retrieved August 31, 2023. OCLC 2311950 (all editions) (publication); OCLC 60765129 (all editions) (article).
* "Description of a Large Induction-Coil". The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine. 3 (15): 30–34. January 1877. Retrieved April 20, 2019. LCCN 2003-249007; ISSN 1478-6435 (print), ISSN 1478-6443 (online); OCLC 476300855 (all editions).
* Spottiswoode, William, D.C.L., LL.D., President of the Royal Society (1881). A Lecture on the Electrical Discharge, Its Forms and Its Functions. Delivered before the British Association at York, on 5th September 1881. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. p. 46.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) OCLC 49580559.
* Patents for Inventions. Abridgements of Specifications Relating to Photography. London: Printed by George Edward Eyre (1804–1887) and William Spottiswoode (1825–1883). 1878. OCLC 23009418 (all editions), 1331441231, 86023087, and 1979 Re-Print by Arno Press → LCCN 76-23063; ISBN 0-4050-9626-7, 978-0-4050-9626-6; OCLC 862997550.

## Gallery

* An induction coil built in 1876 by British electrical instrument maker Alfred Apps (1839–1913) for Spottiswoode. Among the largest of its kind, this coil could generate a spark 42 inches (106 cm) long, equating to an approximate voltage of 1.2 million volts. It was powered by 30 quart size liquid batteries and a separate interrupter.