Dr William Leonard FerrarFRSE (21 October 1893 – 22 January 1990) was an English mathematician. He focused on interpolation theory and number theory.
Early life
Ferrar was born on 21 October 1893 in St Pauls, Bristol, the son of Maria Susannah Ferrar and her husband George William Persons Ferrar, a lamplighter.[1]
He attended Bristol Grammar School. In 1912, he gained a place at The Queen's College in Oxford, winning the Junior Mathematical Scholarship in 1914.[2] His studies were interrupted by the First World War during which he first spent as a telephonist in the artillery then as an intelligence officer in France.
He returned to Oxford in 1919 and graduated MA in 1920, and later received a doctorate (DSc).[1]
From its creation until 1933, he was the editor at the university of the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics in which he published many papers. In 1937, he became the bursar of Hertford College, Oxford which he was employed at for 22 years. After being the bursar in 1959, he became the Principal of the college.[2] In 1947, he belated applied for a doctorate and received a DSc.
Publications
A Textbook of Convergence (1938)
Algebra: a Textbook of Determinants, Matrices and Quadratic Forms (1941, 2nd ed. 1957)
12"William Leonard Ferrar Biography". www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk. School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
