Book Description

This is the first biography of a mathematical genius and his literary wife, their wide circle of well-known intellectual and artistic friends, and through them of the age in which they lived. William Clifford died in 1879 at the age of 33. During his short life he became renowned not only for his innovative and lasting mathematics, but also for his philosophy, which embraced the fundamentals of scientific thought, the nature of the physical universe, Darwinian evolutionary theory, the nature of consciousness, personal morality and law, and the whole mystery of being. It is now recognised among mathematicians and physicists that Dirac's theory of the electron, fundamental to modern physics, is based on Clifford algebra. He also anticipated Einstein's idea that space is curved. The year after his election to the Royal Society, Clifford married Lucy Lane, the journalist and novelist. During their four years of marriage they held Sunday salons which were attended by many well-known scientific, literary and artistic personalities. After William's death, Lucy became a close friend and confidante of Henry James. Her wide circle of friends included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Thomas Huxley, Sir Frederick Macmillan, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Monty Chisholm has researched the lives of these two influential people from archive material, biographies of those who knew them, and hitherto unpublished collections of letters. Her insight, not only into the lives of the Cliffords, but also into the period in which they lived, makes for fascinating and lively reading. The book is further enhanced by a personal reflection on William Clifford's mathematics in the Afterword by the celebrated mathematician Sir Roger Penrose O.M.