George Johnston Allman

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George Allman's parents were Anne and William Allman who was the professor of botany in Trinity College, Dublin. George studied mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, and graduated in 1844 coming first equal among the First Class students and winning the gold medal for mathematics. He married Louisa Taylor of Dublin and Corballis, County Meath, in 1853. They had one son and two daughters.

In 1853 Allman was appointed as Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College, Galway. He held this position for forty years until he reached retiring age in 1893. As to his mathematical contributions [1]:-

He contributed a few papers on mathematical subjects to scientific periodicals, besides an account of Professor James MacCullagh's lectures on 'The attraction of the ellipsoid', which appears in the latter's collected works. He also wrote a number of articles in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Greek mathematicians.

In fact his most significant contribution was Greek geometry from Thales to Euclid published in Dublin in 1889 [1]:-

In this he traced the rise and progress of geometry and arithmetic, and threw new light on the history of the early development of mathematics.

Allman developed methods of deduction of historical information which have proved fundamental in discovering information of the type described in our articles How do we know about Greek mathematics? and How do we know about Greek mathematicians? in this archive. For example in [3] Neuenschwander uses a philological technique developed by Allman in his studies of Hippocrates of Chios in order to show that Eutocius was by no means quoting directly from Eudemus's History of geometry.

He was honoured with the award of an honorary D.Sc. from Dublin University in 1882 and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1884. He died of pneumonia at Farnham House, Finglas, Dublin.

Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

Honours awarded to George Allman (Click below for those honoured in this way)
Fellow of the Royal Society	1884

JOC/EFR © February 2005 Copyright information	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
The URL of this page is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Allman.html