About James Joseph Sylvester
James Joseph Sylvester was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was a professor at Oxford University. Sylvester invented a great number of mathematical terms such as "matrix" (in 1850), "graph" in the sense of network and "discriminant". In 1841, he was awarded a BA and an MA by Trinity College Dublin. In 1838, Sylvester became professor of natural philosophy at University College London and in 1839 a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
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