Background

He was born on 7 June 1835 at Bruce Castle, Tottenham, Middlesex. He was the son of Arthur Hill, headmaster of Bruce Castle School, and was born at Bruce Castle, Tottenham, Middlesex.

His grandfather had been a successful engraver in London before emigrating to Philadelphia in 1816.

Hill’s father, John William Hill, was born in England while his mother, Catherine Smith, was descended from an old Huguenot family.

Both Hill’s father and younger brother were painters, and in 1846 his father retired to a farm in Nyack Turnpike (now West Nyack), New York.

Education

Country residence during Hill’s youth was likely to carry with it grave drawbacks in the education of the young; teaching was frequently restricted to a few subjects on an elementary level.

George Birkbeck Hill was educated in his father's school and at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Hill was extremely fortunate, while at Rutgers College, to come under the influence of Theodore Strong, a friend of Nathaniel Bowditch, who had translated Laplace’s Mécanique céleste into English.

After receiving the B. A. from Rutgers in 1859, Hill went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to further his mathematical knowledge.

Career

In 1858 he began to teach at Bruce Castle school.

He had already begun to publish in 1859, while still at college, and his third paper, “On the Conformation of the Earth, ” in J. D. Runkle’s Mathematical Monthly (1861) brought him a prize and the attention of Runkle as well, R. S. Woodward, president of the Royal Society at the time he wrote Hill’s obituary notice, counted the paper as still worthy of reading and considered Hill as having become the leading contributor to the advances in dynamic astronomy during the half-century after its publication.

Poincaré said that to Strong Euler was “the god of mathematics” whose death marked the beginning of the decline of mathematics.

Hill’s knowledge of the techniques of the old masters strengthened his ingenuity in the creation of new methodology.

The extent of the Eulerian method in its use of moving rectangular axes and the same first approximation.

This device led to Hill’s variational curve, the reference orbit in describing lunar motion.

E. W. Brown developed the work still further for the preparation of lunar ephemerides.

Hill was induced to work on the theories of Jupiter and Saturn, known to be exceptionally difficult in the determination of their mutual perturbations.

Because the Nautical Almanac office had meanwhile been transferred to Washington to be under the more immediate jurisdiction of the Navy Department, Hill resided there for a ten-year period beginning in 1882.

His success with the Newcomb assignment represented one of the most important contributions to nineteenth-century mathematical astronomy.

The calculation of the effects of the planets on the moon’s motion was a particular case of the famous three-body problem, which dates back to Newton (1686).

Hill’s “Researches in the Lunar Theory, ” published in the first issue of American Journal of Mathematics (1878), had, through its introduction of the periodic orbit, initiated a new approach to the study of three mutually attracting bodies.

In 1898 J. K. Rees, who held the Rutherfurd chair of astronomy at Columbia University, persuaded Hill to accept the newly created lectureship in celestial mechanics.

F. R. Moulton wrote in 1914 that no earlier work had approached it in practical application and no subsequent work had then surpassed it.

He was led to a differential equation, now called Hill’s equation, that is equivalent to an infinite number of algebraic linear equations.

Hill showed how to develop the infianite determinant corresponding to these equations.

Hill’s procedures reflect his preference for the methodology of Charles Delaunay, as developed in the two-volume Théorie du mouvement de la lune (1860–1867), and he is said to have perfected it.

Yet the methods adopted in the Nautical Almanac work were essentially those of P. A. Hansen, the other lunar theorist of eminence at that time.

Since few students were qualified to comprehend work on that level, Hill objected to receiving pay and finally resigned in 1901.

He was urged to write out his lectures, which he did very painstakingly; he gave them to Columbia but insisted on returning the money that had been paid to him.

Achievements

• Hill’s many honors included membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1874), presidency of the American Mathematical Society (1894–1896), and the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his researches on lunar theory (1887).
  
  Hill remained a recluse in West Nyack, devoted to his researches and to his large scientific library, which he bequeathed to Columbia University.
  
  He was a foreign member of the Royal Society, the Paris Academy, and the Belgian Academy.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Dr. Johnson, His Friends and His Critics

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Unpublished letters. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Letters of David Hume to William Strahan (With Active Table of Contents)

    (ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, ...)

  • Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland) With Illus. by Lancelot Speed

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Letters of George Birkbeck Hill, D. C. L., LL. D. hon. fellow of Pembroke college, Oxford

    (This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)

  • Letters of George Birkbeck Hill

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Dr. Johnson: His Friends and His Critics 1878

    (Originally published in 1878. This volume from the Cornel...)

  • Life of Johnson, Volume 2. 1765-1776

    (Excerpt: ...feudal principle of continuing the male succe...)

  • Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica
  • Life of Johnson, Volume 3 1776-1780

Membership

He was a member of the Royal Society, National Academy of Sciences (1874), a member of the American Mathematical Society (1894–1896),

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• In the opinion of Simon Newcomb, Hill was destined to rank “as the greatest master of mathematical astronomy during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. ”

Connections

He married Annie Scott, the sister of a friend from his schooldays, on 29 December 1858.

Father:

Arthur Hill

friends:

Edward Burne-Jones

Wife:

Annie Scott

Sister:

Laura Hill

References

• Letters of George Birkbeck Hill
• Letters of George Birkbeck Hill