Robert Leslie Ellis (25 August 1817 – 12 May 1859) was an English polymath, remembered principally as a mathematician and editor of the works of

Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon argued for the importance of nat ...

Biography

Robert Leslie Ellis was the youngest of six children of Francis Ellis (1772–1842) of

Bath Bath may refer to: * Bathing, immersion in a fluid ** Bathtub, a large open container for water, in which a person may wash their body ** Public bathing, a public place where people bathe * Thermae, ancient Roman public bathing facilities Plac ...

and his wife Mary née Kilbee (1777–1847). He was named after his paternal grandfather Robert Ellis and his wife Penelope née Leslie with ‘Leslie’ being a second surname not a forename. Educated privately, he entered

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

, in 1836, graduating as

Senior Wrangler The Senior Wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge in England, a position which has been described as "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain". Specifically, it is the person who achiev ...

in 1840 and elected Fellow of Trinity shortly afterwards. Although he had also entered the

Inner Temple The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, commonly known as the Inner Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court and is a professional association for barristers and judges. To be called to the Bar and practice as a barrister in England and Wa ...

in 1838, was called to the bar in 1840, and later helped

William Whewell William Whewell ( ; 24 May 17946 March 1866) was an English polymath. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. In his time as a student there, he achieved distinction in both poetry and mathematics. The breadth of Whewell's endeavours is ...

(his eventual brother-in-law via sister 'Fanny') with jurisprudence, Ellis never practised law. He hoped unsuccessfully for the Cambridge chair of civil law. Inheriting substantial Irish estates when his father died, estates that had been inherited by his father from his uncle Henry Ellis, Robert Leslie Ellis contemplated entering Parliament as a Whig under Sir William Napier's patronage. Yet his courtship of one of Napier's daughters ended in some confusion: Ellis never married, and never stood for Parliament. As a mathematician, Ellis founded the ''Cambridge Mathematical Journal'' with D. F. Gregory in 1837. He corresponded with

Augustus De Morgan Augustus De Morgan (27 June 1806 – 18 March 1871) was a British mathematician and logician. He is best known for De Morgan's laws, relating logical conjunction, disjunction, and negation, and for coining the term "mathematical induction", the ...

on the conjectured

four color theorem In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. ''Adjacent'' means that two regions shar ...

. Continental travel failed to restore Ellis' health. An attack of rheumatic fever at

Sanremo Sanremo, also spelled San Remo in English and formerly in Italian, is a (municipality) on the Mediterranean coast of Liguria, in northwestern Italy. Founded in Roman times, it has a population of 55,000, and is known as a tourist destination ...

in 1849 left him an invalid, and he returned to Cambridge, living at Anstey Hall,

Trumpington Trumpington is a village in Cambridgeshire, England, mostly located in Cambridge, with a small southern area of the village extending into the South Cambridgeshire district. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, 2021 UK census, the village had ...

, next to his friend John Grote, vicar of Trumpington. From his sickbed Ellis kept up contact with the young Trinity mathematician William Walton, and dictated his thoughts on a wide range of topics, including etymology, bees' cells, Roman money, the principles of a projected Chinese dictionary, and Boole's ''

The Laws of Thought ''An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities'' by George Boole, published in 1854, is the second of Boole's two monographs on algebraic logic. Boole was a professor of mathe ...

'' (1854).

Works

Ellis took on the editing of

's works with two other Trinity fellows, Douglas Denon Heath and James Spedding. Dramatic deterioration of Ellis's health from 1847 left his work on the general prefaces to Bacon's philosophy unfinished. Spedding and Heath completed the ''Works'' in seven volumes, published 1857–1859. Ellis's own major mathematical contributions were on functional and differential equations, and the theory of probability ("On the foundations of the theory of probabilitiesW, read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on 14 February 1842; published in the fourth volume of the ''Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society'' of 1844). Philosophically, Ellis, like

George Boole George Boole ( ; 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. H ...

and later

John Venn John Venn, Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, FSA (4 August 1834 – 4 April 1923) was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher noted for introducing Venn diagrams, which are used in l ...

, defended an objective rather than subjective theory of probability. William Walton edited a posthumous collection of both published and unpublished writings, in ''The mathematical and other writings of R. L. Ellis'' (1863): this was prefaced by a biographical memoir by Harvey Goodwin. Correspondence and notebooks of Ellis are amongst the Mayor Papers and Whewell Papers at

.Catalogue entries for Ellis, Robert Leslie (1817-1859) mathematician
/ref> Leslie translated

Dante Dante Alighieri (; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer, and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called ...

Roman law Roman law is the law, legal system of ancient Rome, including the legal developments spanning over a thousand years of jurisprudence, from the Twelve Tables (), to the (AD 529) ordered by Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. Roman law also den ...

texts and Danish ballads; a gentle melancholia suffuses the lines of his own poetry which he left in manuscript.

Notes

References

* Goodwin, Harvey (1863
"Biographical Memoir of Robert Leslie Ellis"
In W. Walton, ed., ''The Mathematical and other Writings of R. L. Ellis''. * Kiliç, Berna (2000) "Robert Leslie Ellis and John Stuart Mill on the one and the many of frequentism", ''British Journal for the History of Philosophy'' 8:2. * Panteki, Maria
"Ellis, Robert Leslie (1817–1859)"
''

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from History of the British Isles, British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') ...

'', Oxford University Press, 2004. * Verburgt, Lukas M. (2013
"Robert Leslie Ellis's work on philosophy of science and the foundations of probability theory"
''Historia Mathematica'' 40:4. * Verburgt, Lukas M. (2022

''A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis,'' 1817–1859. Springer.

External links

* * *
The Mathematical and Other Writings of Robert Leslie Ellis Edited by William Walton. With a biographical memoir by the Very Reverend Harvey Goodwin.
(London: Deighton, Bell & Co., Bell and Daldy, 1863.)
"Robert Leslie Ellis"
entry at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive {{DEFAULTSORT:Ellis, Robert Leslie 1817 births 1859 deaths 19th-century English mathematicians Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge Francis Bacon scholars Senior Wranglers