Alexander Macfarlane

For the Nova Scotia politician, see Alexander Macfarlane.

Alexander Macfarlane (Blairgowrie, Scotland, April 21 1851 – Chatham, Ontario, August 28, 1913) was a Scottish-Canadian logician, physicist, and mathematician.

During his life, Macfarlane played a prominent role in research and education. He was, at various times in his life, physics professor at the University of Texas, professor of Advanced Electricity, and later of mathematical physics, at Lehigh University, and co-founder and president of the International Association for Promoting the Study of Quaternions and Allied Systems of Mathematics until his death.

He was also the author of a popular 1916 collection of mathematical biographies (Ten British Mathematicians), a similar work on physicists (Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century, 1919), and he compiled a bibliography on quaternions in 1904. Significantly, he invented hyperbolic quaternions, precursor to Minkowski space. (He was imbued with hyperbolic geometry through his brother-in-law G. B. Halsted while they taught in Austin.) He actively participated in several International Congresses of Mathematicians including the Paris meeting of 1900 where he described the counter-sphere in the topological ring of coquaternions.

He retired to Chatham, Ontario.

References

• Cargill Gilston Knott, Alexander MacFarlane (obituary), Nature, 25 September 1913.
• Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (editor's preface).

External links

• Biography of Alexander MacFarlane
• Works by Alexander MacFarlane at Project Gutenberg