James Whitbread Lee Glaisher: 1848 - 1928.

Born on 5 November 1848 in Lewisham, Kent, England, and died on 7 December 1928 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England.  Glaisher attended St Paul's School in London, winning a scholarship in 1867 to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. His mathematical researches began while he was still an undergraduate and he wrote a paper on the sine integral, cosine integral and exponential integral giving tables of these integrals which he had computed himself. The paper was communicated to the Royal Society by Cayley. In the final examination of 1871, Glaisher was placed second. Elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, he became a tutor and lecturer and taught at Cambridge all his life.In the same year in which he graduated, Glaisher joined the Royal Astronomical Society and so began a long association with that Society. In 1872 he joined the London Mathematical Society. He went on to hold high office in both these Societies, being President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1886 to 1888
and again from 1901 to 1903, and  President of the London Mathematical Society, 1884-1886.

Glaisher wrote over 400 articles on his main interests of astronomy, special functions, calculation of numerical tables and the history of mathematics. His historical interests were on the early development of numerical computation, Stevin and the beginnings of the decimal system, Napier,  Briggs and the beginnings of logarithms as well as the mathematical notation + and -. He applied special functions to problems in number theory, in particular representations of integers as sums of squares.

The importance of Glaisher is less in the original research he did, much more in that he brought these mathematical topics into the Cambridge syllabus so setting it up to produce the outstanding English mathematicians who were educated there shortly afterwards. The earliest years of his teaching at Cambridge were a time of transition in the mathematical ideals of the University. Cayley was almost a voice in the wilderness; Glaisher himself described Cambridge pure mathematics as generals without armies. When he had ceased teaching, Cambridge pure mathematics had marched beyond his active vision mainly under men whom, as students, he had guided at the beginning. His voice was that of a teacher, yet not in the least similar to the great Cambridge coaches, for he contributed to his science and ranged far beyond conventional examination learning.

He was a personality in his day; and he left a name, high among the noted names of his generation, in two widely different fields of constructive thought and human activity. Glaisher received many honours. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1875. He received the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society in 1908. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the National Academy of Sciences.