Thomas Muir (mathematician)
British mathematician and educationalist (1844–1934)
Sir Thomas Muir (25 August 1844 – 21 March 1934) was a Scottish mathematician, remembered as an authority on determinants.
Life
He was born in Stonebyres in South Lanarkshire, and brought up in the small town of Biggar. He was educated at Wishaw Public School.
At the University of Glasgow he changed his studies from classics to mathematics after advice from the future Lord Kelvin. After graduating he held positions at the University of St Andrews and the University of Glasgow. From 1874 to 1892 he taught at Glasgow High School. In 1882 he published Treatise on the theory of determinants; then in 1890 he published a History of determinants. In his 1882 work, Muir rediscovered an important lemma that was first proved by Cayley 35 years earlier: In Glasgow he lived at Beechcroft in the Bothwell district.
In 1874 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, His proposers were William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, Hugh Blackburn, Philip Kelland and Peter Guthrie Tait. He won the Society's Keith Prize for 1881-1883 and a second time in 1895–1897.
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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 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3525434. VIAF identifies the subject as 37012618. The Library of Congress control number is n84801732. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1844, 1934, 1874 and 1892.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Muir (mathematician)” 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.