Ernest William Brown, 1866 - 1938

Ernest William Brown was born on 29 November 1866, at Hull. In 1884 he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, as a scholar, graduated in 1887 as Sixth Wrangler, and later was made a Fellow of his College. In 1891 he became Professor of Applied Mathematics at Haverford College, Philadelphia. In 1907 he moved to Yale, and was Professor of Mathematics there till his retirement in 1934. He was then made Emeritus Professor there and continued to reside at Newhaven, Conn., till his death on 22 July 1938. He received a considerable number of academic honours which need not be enumerated, and held the rare distinction of being simultaneously both a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences; to the first he was elected in 1897, and to the second after his naturalization as an American citizen in 1923. Brown’s best known work was on the theory of the motion of the moon. Of all problems of gravitational astronomy there is none that has proved so difficult as this.