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In Other Journals

This article, like Tony Crilly's 'A mathematician extraordinary' in the March 1997 Gazette was published one hundred years after Sylvester's death to celebrate his life and research. The authors examine the way in which Sylvester developed the international mathematical scene during his career and show that Sylvester strived for and gained a reputation as one of the principal mathematical figures of the nineteenth century. His working ties with many mathematicians including Hermite, Cayley and Chebyshev are described and a detailed reference list given. He is described as being prolific, gifted, flamboyant, egocentric and cantankerous. Sylvester's major contributions were in invariant theory. proved a generalisation of Poincare's conjecture for dimensions five and higher and in the 1980s Thurston proved that certain 3-manifolds can be broken down into pieces with constant negative curvature. The present article gives a readable account of these famous theories in general terms with some good pictorial illustrations. This paper describes a series of tests given to two groups of children in their eighth year of school. One group were given concrete objects to work with and the other group were not. The tasks included drawing the reflection and rotation of a given object and the children were asked to identify the centre of rotation. Both groups of children found the presence of a grid helpful and the children not using concrete material found the easiest line to reflect in was a vertical line. The results of the test showed that it is significantly easier to rotate than to reflect.