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Frederick Purser

Irish mathematician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ18911833
Source-derived summary

Frederick Purser (1839–30 January 1910) was an Irish mathematician, author, and member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was a younger brother to mathematician John Purser.

Life and career

Born in Dublin, Frederick attended a boarding school run by his uncle Richard Biggs in Wiltshire, England, then attended Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where he was Scholar (1859), and got BA (1860) and MA (1864). He was elected a Fellow there in 1879. He was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy in 1902 and served in the role until his death. He contributed articles to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

Editorial summary

“Frederick Purser” enters the record as irish mathematician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Frederick, Purser and Irish can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1839, 1910, 1859, 1860—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1840-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Frederick, Purser and Irish.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Frederick Purser” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Frederick, Purser and Irish provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18911833. VIAF identifies the subject as 89692665. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1839, 1910, 1859 and 1860.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Frederick Purser”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Frederick Purser primary sources, Frederick Purser archive and Frederick research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Frederick Purser”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Frederick Purser” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.