Abstract
BY the death of William Mitchinson Hicks on August 17, the world of science has lost an outstanding figure, whose achievements were perhaps more appreciated by the last than by the present generation. Born at Launceston on September 23, 1850, he went up to Cambridge in 1870 as a scholar of St. John's College, and reached the position of seventh wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1873. This was the year in which the Cavendish Laboratory was founded with Clerk Maxwell as first professor, and Hicks formed one of the small band of distinguished students of experimental physics who gathered round him, and came directly under his inspiration. In 1876 he was elected a fellow of St. John's, and lived there until 1883, engaged in the earlier stages of his mathematical researches on the theory of vortex rings. In that year he was appointed principal and professor of physics and mathematics in the Firth College at Sheffield, and from this time onward his energy was devoted to the furtherance of university education in that town.
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M., S. Prof. W. M. Hicks, F.R.S. Nature 134, 408–409 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134408a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134408a0