SMITH, HENRY JOHN STEPHEN Eng lish mathematician, was born in Dublin on Nov. 2, 1826. When he was two years old his father died, and his mother left Ireland for England. After being privately educated he entered Rugby school in 1841, and Balliol College, Oxford, in 1844. He was elected a fellow of Balliol in 1850 and Savilian professor of geometry in 1861. He was elected F.R.S. in 1861. He served on various royal commissions, and from 1877 was the chairman of the managing body of the meteorological office. He died at Ox ford on Feb. 9, 1883.
Smith published a few papers on geometry and then began a study of the existing work on the theory of numbers. The results of his researches are contained in his Report on the Theory of Numbers, which appeared in the British Association volumes from 1859 to 1865. His further original researches on the subject were communicated to the Royal Society in two memoirs upon "Systems of Linear Indeterminate Equations and Congruences" and upon the "Orders and Genera of Ternary Quadratic Forms" (Phil. Trans., 1861 and 1867). He also established the principles
on which the extension to the general case of n indeterminates depends, and obtained the general formulae. A brief abstract of his methods and results appeared in the Proc. Roy. Soc. for 1864 and 1868. As corollaries to the general formulae he adds the formulae relating to the representation of a number as a sum of five squares and also of seven squares. After 1864 he devoted himself chiefly to elliptic functions, and published papers in the Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. and elsewhere.
His Collected Papers, prefaced by several biographical notices, were edited by J. W. L. Glaisher (Oxford, 1894).
See the Spectator of Feb. 17, 1883, by Lord Justice Bowen; J. W. L. Glaisher's memoir in the Monthly Notices of the Roy. Ast. Soc. (vol. xliv., 2884).