James Joseph was born in
London on 3 September 1814, the son of Abraham Joseph, a
Jewish merchant. James later adopted the surname
Sylvester when his older brother did so upon emigration to the United States. At the age of 14, Sylvester was a student of
Augustus De Morgan at the University of London (now
University College London). His family withdrew him from the university after he was accused of stabbing a fellow student with a knife. Subsequently, he attended the
Liverpool Royal Institution. Sylvester began his study of mathematics at
St John's College, Cambridge in 1831, where his tutor was
John Hymers. Although his studies were interrupted for almost two years due to a prolonged illness, he nevertheless ranked second in Cambridge's famous mathematical examination, the
tripos, for which he sat in 1837. However, Sylvester was not issued a degree, because graduates at that time were required to state their acceptance of the
Thirty-nine Articles of the
Church of England, and he could not do so because he was Jewish. For the same reason, he was unable to compete for a Fellowship or obtain a
Smith's prize. In 1838, Sylvester became professor of natural philosophy at
University College London and in 1839 a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1841, he was awarded a BA and an
MA by
Trinity College Dublin. In the same year he moved to the United States to become a professor of mathematics at the
University of Virginia, the first Jewish professor at any American college or university. He left his appointment after only four months after a classroom incident in which a student he had criticized hit him with a bludgeon and he struck back with a sword-cane. The student collapsed in shock and Sylvester believed (wrongly) that he had killed him. Sylvester resigned when he felt that the university authorities had not sufficiently disciplined the student. He moved to New York City and began friendships with the Harvard mathematician
Benjamin Peirce (father of
Charles Sanders Peirce) and the Princeton physicist
Joseph Henry. However, he left in November 1843 after being denied appointment as Professor of Mathematics at Columbia College (now University), again for his Judaism, and returned to England. On his return to England, he was hired in 1844 by the Equity and Law Life Assurance Society for which he developed successful actuarial models and served as de facto CEO, a position that required a law degree. As a result, he studied for the Bar, meeting a fellow British mathematician studying law,
Arthur Cayley, with whom he made significant contributions to invariant theory and also
matrix theory during a long collaboration. He did not obtain a position teaching university mathematics until 1855, when he was appointed professor of mathematics at the
Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, from which he retired in 1869, because the compulsory retirement age was 55. The Woolwich academy initially refused to pay Sylvester his full pension, and only relented after a prolonged public controversy, during which Sylvester took his case to the letters page of
The Times. One of Sylvester's lifelong passions was for poetry; he read and translated works from the original French, German, Italian,
Latin and
Greek, and many of his mathematical papers contain illustrative quotes from classical poetry. Following his early retirement, Sylvester published a book entitled
The Laws of Verse in which he attempted to codify a set of laws for
prosody in poetry. In 1861 Sylvester was elected an honorary member of the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and in 1872, he finally received his B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge, having been denied the degrees due to his being a Jew. Sylvester again crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become the inaugural professor of mathematics at the new
Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, Maryland. His salary was $5,000 (quite generous for the time), which he demanded be paid in gold. After negotiation, agreement was reached on a salary that was not paid in gold. In 1877, he was elected as a member to the
American Philosophical Society. In 1878 he founded the
American Journal of Mathematics. The only other mathematical journal in the US at that time was
The Analyst, which eventually became the
Annals of Mathematics. Also in 1878,
Christine Ladd-Franklin was accepted into
Johns Hopkins University with his help. He remembered some of Ladd's earlier works in the
Educational Times. Ladd's application for a fellowship was signed "C. Ladd", and the university offered her the position without realizing she was a woman. When they did realise her gender, the board tried to revoke the offer, but Sylvester insisted that Ladd should be his student, and so she was. Sylvester died at 5
Hertford Street, London on 15 March 1897. He is buried in
Balls Pond Road Cemetery on Kingsbury Road in London. ==Legacy==