These days it’s not too hard to find academicians who are very independent-minded and stand up to things like traditions, university bureaucracy, and political niceties. But in the first half of the nineteenth century it was much more unusual. One example, though, is Augustus De Morgan, who was born June 27, 1806 in Madras Presidency. The Presidency was an administrative province of British India, taking up most of southern India.
De Morgan’s father worked for the East India Company, which explains his birth location, but the family moved to England when he was just seven months old. His mother was from the Dodson family — her grandfather was the mathematician John Dodson. There may have been some genetic predisposition involved when De Morgan was noticed doing advanced work in geometry completely independently. He was about 14 at the time.
Two years later, at 16, De Morgan enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge, and placed forth in the Mathematical Tripos, the math curriculum there. That alone entitled him to an immediate BA degree in math. He could have continued on to earn a Master’s degree, but in those days you had to pass a test in theology to enroll for advanced degrees. De Morgan objected to even taking the test, and quit school. He joined the Lincoln’s Inn to pursue a career in law. (At the time, the Court of London maintained four “inns” from which lawyers, or barristers, would be called to the bar).
However, the London University planned to open in 1828, and advertised vacancies for professorial positions. London University is now University College London, and was founded as a secular alternative to Oxford and Cambridge. They didn’t require theological tests. Two of the advertised openings were in math, and De Morgan applied and got one. The other candidates, by the way, included Charles Babbage and John Herschel, as well as at least eight other scholars prominent enough to have their own Wikipedia pages in the 21st century.
De Morgan’s independent nature had landed him a job, and it also showed whenever anyone asked him about his nationality, as they might when they found he’d been born outside England. He would reply that he wasn’t English, Scottish, or Irish, but “unattached,” which was the term for students at Oxford and Cambridge who weren’t members of any of the colleges. His independence eventually lost him the job he’d gotten, too. In about 1831 the medical students at London University protested and called for the removal of a Professor of Anatomy (Granville Pattison), due to his incompetence. De Morgan got involved in the argument, and after Pattison was fired he resigned, evidently annoyed with the way the school had handled the controversy.
When he resigned, though, De Morgan already had a number of publications including The Elements of Arithmetic and The Elements of Algebra. They were used as textbooks for many years, including by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It was an organization dedicated to providing inexpensive publications to middle- and working-class people of the UK, giving them access to better educations — they were the “self-paced learning” tools of the day. De Morgan got more involved in the Society and became one of the most prolific writers for them; he wrote seven books and over 700 articles for the group.
In 1836 London University convinced De Morgan to come back, and he remained Professor of Mathematics there for the next 30 years. His classes were highly popular and often attracted more than 100 students. He also became the first president of the London Mathematical Society in 1865. This was a bit of a departure from his usual reaction to formal organizations; he never became a member of the similar Royal Society and never even attended a meeting. Contemporaries believed he could easily have become a Fellow of the society. He also turned down at least one honorary degree, and described himself as homo paucarum literarum (man of few letters). He reportedly never voted, and although he lived in London, never visited the Tower of London, the House of Commons, or Westminster Abbey, all of which were already popular attractions in the 1800s.
In 1866, his university needed to hire a new professor in the philosophy department, and a dispute arose over whether a prominent applicant who was a Unitarian clergyman should be hired or not — the dispute centered on the applicant’s theological point of view. De Morgan, remembering that the university supposedly didn’t have any theological tests or requirements, resigned again. He was 60. His students organized a pension for him (£500 per year; a pretty good sum at the time), but tragedies in his personal life — the deaths of his son George, also a mathematician, and his daughter, affected him and his health, and he died in 1871 of what was called nervous prostration. The term was used for a variety of mental and emotional disorders.
De Morgan created De Morgan’s Laws, which are well known in Boolean algebra, and the headquarters of the London Mathematical Society is De Morgan House. The society’s top annual prize is the De Morgan Medal. The student mathematical organization at University College London (the current name of London University) is the Augustus De Morgan Society. And somewhere on the Moon thers is a crater named De Morgan.
