Background
His father owned and managed a china store in Woodbridge; his mother was the daughter of a country banker at Attleborough, Norfolk.
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Frank Morley
Edit ProfileEducation
The family had been comfortably situated, but the development of railroads diverted business to London, and young Morley had to borrow money to enable him to go to college.
He attended the Seckford Grammar School in Woodbridge and had an excellent scholastic record there, distinguishing himself in mathematics.
Upon graduation he went to King's College, Cambridge, where he received the degrees of B. A. (1884), M. A. (1887), and Sc. D.
In 1900 he moved to the Johns Hopkins University, where he remained until his retirement in 1928.
He was an editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (1895-98, 1899 - 1902), editor of the American Journal of Mathematics (1901 - 29), vice-president (1902) and president (1919 - 20) of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Career
(1898).
Morley's specialty in mathematics was the application of complex numbers to the treatment of problems of plane geometry.
He surprised his contemporaries by the discovery, using this method, of striking and completely unsuspected results.
Of these perhaps the most widely known is the following: If each of the three angles of any triangle is trisected, the points of intersection of the three pairs of trisectors which are adjacent to the sides of the triangle are the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
Morley had an enduring interest in music, and the gay and witty operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan had an especial appeal for him.
He was buried in the Quaker Cemetery in Haverford, Pa. [J. J. Withers, A Reg.
of Admissions to King's Coll. , Cambridge (2nd ed. , 1929), pp. 108-09; A. B. Coble in Bull.
of the Am.
Mathematical Soc. , Mar. 1938; H. W. Richmond in Jour.
See also biog.
sketch and bibliog, in R. C. Archibald, Semicentennial Hist.
of the Am.
Mathematical Soc.
(1938); Am.
Mathematical Monthly, Dec. 1937; Science, Nov. 19, 1937. ]
Connections
- married:
- Lillian
- colleague:
- James
- children:
- Lillian
On July 11, 1889, Morley married Lillian Janet Bird of Hayward's Heath, Sussex, England, by whom he had three children: Christopher Darlington, Felix Muskett, and Frank Vigor.
During his stay at Haverford he published, in collaboration with his colleague James Harkness, two texts on the theory of functions of a complex variable (Treatise on the Theory of Functions, 1893, and Introduction to the Theory of Analytic Functions, 1898) which attracted wide attention, and after his retirement from Hopkins he published, in collaboration with his son Frank V. Morley, a book entitled Inversive Geometry (1933), which stands alone in its field and pictures clearly Morley's particular genius.
On July 11, 1889, Morley married Lillian Janet Bird of Hayward's Heath, Sussex, England, by whom he had three children: Christopher Darlington, Felix Muskett, and Frank Vigor.
