George Chrystal was a Scottish mathematician. He was a contributor to the drafting of the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889 and one of the founders of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.
Background
Chrystal was born on March 8, 1851, in Oldmeldrum, Scotland. Chrystal’s father, William, a self-made man, was successively a grain merchant, a farmer, and a landed proprietor. His mother was the daughter of James Burr of Mains of Glack, Aberdeenshire.
Education
Chrystal attended the local parish school and later Aberdeen Grammar School, from which he won a scholarship to Aberdeen University in 1867. He moved in 1872 to study under James Clerk Maxwell at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he graduated Second Wrangler in 1875, joint with William Burnside, and was elected a fellow of Corpus Christi.
Entering Peterhouse in 1872, Chrystal came under the influence of Clerk Maxwell, and when the Cavendish Laboratory was opened in 1874 he carried out experimental work there. In the mathematical tripos examination of 1875 he was bracketed (with William Burnside) second wrangler and Smith’s prizeman and was immediately elected to a fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
In 1877 he was appointed to the Regius chair of mathematics in the University of St. Andrews and in 1879 to the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University. Chrystal’s thirty-two-year tenure of the Edinburgh chair saw a progressive and substantial rise in the standard of the mathematical syllabus and teaching at the university, especially after the institution of specialized honors degrees by the Universities (Scotland) Act of 1899. The main burden of formulating policies and drafting regulations under the act fell on Chrystal as dean of the Faculty of Arts, an office he held from 1890 until his death.
He also contributed much to pre-university education throughout Scotland, acting as inspector of secondary schools, initiating a scheme for a standard schoolleaving-certificate examination, and negotiating the transfer of the teacher-training colleges from control by the Presbyterian churches to a new provincial committee, of which he was the first chairman. Notwithstanding his administrative and teaching burdens, Chrystal found time for scientific work.
His wide-ranging textbook on algebra, with its clear, rigorous, and original treatment of such topics as inequalities, limits, convergence, and the use of the complex variable, profoundly influenced mathematical education throughout Great Britain and beyond its borders. He published some seventy articles, about equally divided between scientific biography, mathematics, and physics. Many of the biographies, written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, are still of considerable value. In the mathematical papers his strength lay particularly in lucid exposition and consolidation. Of the physics papers the most important are two long survey articles, “Electricity” and “Magnetism,” in the ninth edition of the encyclopaedia, and his later hydrodynamic and experimental investigations of the free oscillations (known as seiches) in lakes, particularly the Scottish lochs, using the results of a recent bathymetric survey.
Chrystal held honorary doctorates from Aberdeen and Glasgow and was awarded a Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London just before his death. He was buried at Foveran, Aberdeenshire, and was survived by four sons and two daughters.
Chrystal was an outstanding administrator, with an exceptionally quick grasp of detail, tactful, fair-minded, and forward-looking.
Interests
Photography, cycling
Connections
Chrystal married Margaret Anne Balfour in 1879. She died before him and is buried in the northern Victorian extension to Dean Cemetery with their son Walter MacDonald Chrystal who died in infancy. They had four sons and two daughters.