Daniel Edwin Rutherford

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This so ...

(4 January 1906, in

Stirling Stirling (; sco, Stirlin; gd, Sruighlea ) is a city in central Scotland, northeast of Glasgow and north-west of Edinburgh. The market town, surrounded by rich farmland, grew up connecting the royal citadel, the medieval old town with its me ...

– 9 November 1966, in

St Andrews St Andrews ( la, S. Andrea(s); sco, Saunt Aundraes; gd, Cill Rìmhinn) is a town on the east coast of Fife in Scotland, southeast of Dundee and northeast of Edinburgh. St Andrews had a recorded population of 16,800 , making it Fife's four ...

) was a Scottish mathematician, known for his work on the representation theory of

symmetric group In abstract algebra, the symmetric group defined over any set is the group whose elements are all the bijections from the set to itself, and whose group operation is the composition of functions. In particular, the finite symmetric group ...

Biography

Rutherford completed his secondary education at

Perth Academy Perth Academy is a state comprehensive secondary school in Perth, Scotland. It was founded in 1696. The institution is a non-denominational one. The school occupies ground on the side of a hill in the Viewlands area of Perth, and is within the P ...

in 1924 and then, with the aid of a

bursary A bursary is a monetary award made by any educational institution or funding authority to individuals or groups. It is usually awarded to enable a student to attend school, university or college when they might not be able to, otherwise. Some aw ...

, he went to the

University of St Andrews (Aien aristeuein) , motto_lang = grc , mottoeng = Ever to ExcelorEver to be the Best , established = , type = Public research university Ancient university , endowment ...

, where he received his B.Sc. in 1927 and his M.A. in 1928 in mathematics. Upon the advice of

Herbert Turnbull Prof Herbert Westren Turnbull FRS FRSE LLD (31 August 1885 – 4 May 1961) was an English mathematician. From 1921 to 1950 he was Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews. Life He was born in the Tettenhall district, o ...

, Rutherford did his graduate work at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other bein ...

, where he wrote a ''doctorandus'' thesis under Roland Weitzenböck. Rutherford's dissertation was published in 1932 as ''Modular Invariants'' in the Cambridge Tracts. He became an assistant lecturer at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

and then an assistant lecturer at the

University of St Andrews (Aien aristeuein) , motto_lang = grc , mottoeng = Ever to ExcelorEver to be the Best , established = , type = Public research university Ancient university , endowment ...

, where he in 1934 was promoted to "Lecturer in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics" and given the task of building up the department in applied mathematics. At St Andrews, he received in 1949 a D.Sc. and then became in 1952 a reader and in 1964 a professor in the Gregory Chair of Applied Mathematics. His research specialty was algebra and in particular the representation theory of symmetric groups. His most famous book, ''Substitutional Analysis'' (1948), presents his research on the

Young tableaux In mathematics, a Young tableau (; plural: tableaux) is a combinatorial object useful in representation theory and Schubert calculus. It provides a convenient way to describe the group representations of the symmetric and general linear groups a ...

of Alfred Young. Rutherford published some research on numerical methods in fluid dynamics. He was the author of 3 books on pure mathematics and 3 books on applied mathematics and also the coauthor of a textbook on elementary abstract algebra. In 1934 Rutherford was elected a member of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

. His proposers were

, Sir

Edmund Taylor Whittaker Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker (24 October 1873 – 24 March 1956) was a British mathematician, physicist, and historian of science. Whittaker was a leading mathematical scholar of the early 20th-century who contributed widely to applied mathema ...

, Edward Copson and

Geoffrey Timms Geoffrey Timms OBE FRSE (1903–1982) was a 20th century British mathematician and cryptoanalyst. In the Second World War he was one of the several mathematicians working alongside Alan Turing at Bletchley Park breaking the Enigma code. Life ...

. He won the Society's

Keith Medal The Keith Medal was a prize awarded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy, for a scientific paper published in the society's scientific journals, preference being given to a paper containing a discovery, either in mathem ...

in 1953. In 1966 he (posthumously) won the Makdougall Brisbane Prize. He was survived by his widow and two daughters.

Publications

* * * * * * *with E. M. Patterson: *

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Rutherford, Daniel Edwin 1906 births 1966 deaths 20th-century Scottish mathematicians Alumni of the University of St Andrews Academics of the University of St Andrews People from Stirling University of Amsterdam alumni