Robert Leslie Ellis

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.

Biography

Robert Leslie Ellis was the youngest of six children of Francis Ellis (1772–1842) of Bath 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, in 1836, graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1840 and elected Fellow of Trinity shortly afterwards. Although he had also entered the Inner Temple in 1838, was called to the bar in 1840, and later helped William Whewell (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 on the conjectured four color theorem.