Edward Bromhead

Sir Edward Thomas ffrench Bromhead, 2nd Baronet (26 March 1789 – 14 March 1855) was a British landowner and mathematician best remembered as patron of the mathematician and physicist George Green.

Born into a landed family in Lincolnshire, Bromhead was educated at the University of Glasgow and later at Caius College, Cambridge before taking up the study of law at the Inner Temple in London.^[1] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1817. Returning to Lincolnshire, he became High Steward of Lincoln.

While at Cambridge, Bromhead was a founder of the Analytical Society, a precursor of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, together with John Herschel, George Peacock and Charles Babbage, with whom he maintained a close and lifelong friendship. While he was, by all accounts, a gifted mathematician in his own right (although ill-health prevented him from pursuing his studies further), his greatest contribution to the subject is at second hand: having subscribed to the first publication of self-taught mathematician and physicist George Green, he encouraged Green to continue his research and to write further papers (which Bromhead sent on to be published in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and those of the Royal Society of Edinburgh).

References

• Edwards, A. W. F. "Bromhead, Sir Edward Thomas Ffrench". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37224.  (subscription or UK public library membership required)
• Cannel, D. M. and Lord, N. J. (March 1993). "George Green, mathematician and physicist 1793–1841". The Mathematical Gazette 77: 26–51. doi:10.2307/3619259.  Mentions Bromhead's role in the career of George Green.

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