Samuel Roberts FRS (15 December 1827, in

Horncastle, Lincolnshire Horncastle is a market town and civil parish in the East Lindsey district in Lincolnshire, England. It is east of Lincoln. Its population was 6,815 at the 2011 census and estimated at 7,123 in 2019. A section of the ancient Roman walls rem ...

– 18 September 1913, in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

) was a British mathematician. Roberts studied at

Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle, is a co-educational grammar school with academy status in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, England. In 2009, there were 877 pupils, of whom 271 were in the sixth form. Although royally chartered by Qu ...

. He matriculated in 1845 at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

, where he earned in 1847 his bachelor's degree in mathematics and in 1849 his master's degree in mathematics and physics, as first in his class. Next he studied law and became a solicitor in 1853. After a few years of law practice he abandoned his law career and returned to mathematics, although he never had an academic position. He had his first mathematical paper published in 1848. In 1865 he was an important participant in the founding of the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh ...

(LMS). From 1866 to 1892 he acted as legal counsel for LMS, from 1872 to 1880 he was the organization's treasurer, and from 1880 to 1882 its president. In 1896 he received the

De Morgan Medal The De Morgan Medal is a prize for outstanding contribution to mathematics, awarded by the London Mathematical Society. The Society's most prestigious award, it is given in memory of Augustus De Morgan, who was the first President of the society ...

of the LMS. In 1878 he was elected FRS. Roberts published papers in several fields of mathematics, including

geometry Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...

interpolation In the mathematics, mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points. In engineering and science, one ...

theory, and

Diophantine equation ''Diophantine'' means pertaining to the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus. A number of concepts bear this name: *Diophantine approximation In number theory, the study of Diophantine approximation deals with the approximation of real n ...

s. Roberts and Pafnuty Chebyschev are jointly credited with the Roberts-Chebyshev theorem related to four-bar linkages. Roberts's triangle theorem, on the minimum number of triangles that

n

lines can form, is also named after Roberts, who published the theorem (with an unconvincing proof) in 1889.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Roberts, Samuel 19th-century English mathematicians 20th-century English mathematicians 1827 births 1913 deaths Fellows of the Royal Society People from Horncastle, Lincolnshire Alumni of the University of London People educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle