Notes

Abstract

A FINE specimen of a rare class among the scientifically! eminent passed away when the Rev. Robert Harley, F.R.S., died on July 26, in his eighty-third year. Many friends will miss his hale face and hearty greeting at meetings of the Royal Society; and few of them can have had any idea that one so keen in his interest could be an octogenarian. Mathematics with him was a parergon, almost a hobby. He achieved distinction in it in early middle life, pursuing it in scanty intervals of leisure secured without neglect of engrossing non-scientific duties. The son of a Methodist minister, he had no early mathematical training. At the age of twenty-three he entered Airedale College as a student of theology, and shortly afterwards he was ordained as pastor of the Congregational Church at Brighouse, Co. Yorks. Here he found time to become a mathematician of mark. The application of mathematics to logic as developed by George Boole, captivated his intelligence, and he became the most notable of Boole's admirers and followers, as also his biographer. His greatest mathematical achievements were, however, in another field. The unsolved problem of the solution of quintic equations fascinated him. Having once granted the impossibility of the solution by radicals, he proceeded to exhibit with remarkable power and patience- the place of certain sextic resolvents in connection with such equations. Simultaneously, the late Sir James Cockle was engaged on like work; but Harley was the clearer writer on the difficult subject. Their work, and in particular Harley's, was welcomed enthusiastically by Cayley, who himself took, it up and continued it. All three prbbably were not aware at the time that certain Continental writers had possessed some of their ideas beforehand; but everyone must recognise that Harley's development of the ideas was masterly. It secured for him the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1863. Since then, as before, he carried on mathematical research only in such time as was allowed by devotion to pastoral, philanthropic, and temperance work. He laboured in Leicester, Oxford (where he was an original member of the Oxford Mathematical Society, and was given the honorary degree of Master of Arts by the University), Halifax, and elsewhere.. From 1872 until. 1881 he was vice-principal (and chaplain) of Mill Hill School. For the three years before his removal to Oxford in 1886 he was principal of Huddersfield College. In 1890 he took a period of rest (with pastoral work) in Sydney, Australia. Since 1895 his life was one of retirement, but far from one of inactivity, whether religious, benevolent, or scientific..