Henry Cabourn Pocklington
FRS (28 January 1870,
Exeter
Exeter ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and the county town of Devon in South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol.
In Roman Britain, Exeter w ...
– 15 May 1952,
Leeds
Leeds is a city in West Yorkshire, England. It is the largest settlement in Yorkshire and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds Metropolitan Borough, which is the second most populous district in the United Kingdom. It is built aro ...
) was an
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Culture, language and peoples
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
* ''English'', an Amish ter ...
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
and
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
. His primary profession was as a
schoolmaster
A schoolmaster, or simply master, is a male school teacher. The usage first occurred in England in the Late Middle Ages and early modern period. At that time, most schools were one-room or two-room schools and had only one or two such teacher ...
, but he made important contributions to
number theory
Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic functions. Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of mathematical objects constructed from integers (for example ...
with the discovery of
Pocklington's primality test in 1914
and the invention of
Pocklington's algorithm. He also derived the first equation for the current in a wire
antenna, Pocklington's integral equation.
References
*
English physicists
19th-century English mathematicians
20th-century English mathematicians
Fellows of the Royal Society
1870 births
1952 deaths
People from Exeter
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