Background
Clifford was born on May 4, 1845, in Exeter, England, the son of a justice of the peace, William Clifford.
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
Clifford was educated at King’s College, London.
Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK
In October 1863 Clifford took up a minor scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics.
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
Clifford was educated at King’s College, London.
Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK
In October 1863 Clifford took up a minor scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics.
Clifford by John Collier
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Dynamic-Introduction-Motion-Bodies/dp/B0191LX8U2/?tag=2022091-20
1878
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-William-Kingdon-1845-1879-Clifford/dp/1371894442/?tag=2022091-20
1879
https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Essays-William-Kingdon-Clifford/dp/B00ATXGLB0/?tag=2022091-20
1879
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1331891892/?tag=2022091-20
1885
mathematician philosopher scientist
Clifford was born on May 4, 1845, in Exeter, England, the son of a justice of the peace, William Clifford.
Clifford was educated at a small private school in Exeter until, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to King’s College, London. In October 1863 he took up a minor scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics.
At the university, Clifford distinguished himself not only by his intellect but also by his singular character. As one of the most prominent undergraduates, he was soon invited to join the Apostles, an exclusive Cambridge club made up of the twelve most distinguished undergraduates of the time. Here he exhibited some of that breadth of learning and clarity of mind for which he was to be noted all his life.
Clifford was the second wrangler in the mathematical tripos, and second Smith’s prizeman, in 1867. A year later he was elected professor of applied mathematics at University College, London, and in 1874 he became a fellow of the Royal Society.
In mathematics, Clifford was first and foremost a geometer; as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and as a member of a club known as the Apostles, he had inveighed against the current Cambridge bias towards analysis. At a later date, he was atypical in arguing - under the influence of Riemann and Lobachevski - that geometrical truth is a product of experience. It is significant that Clifford, through a translation published in Nature (1873), should have drawn attention in England to Riemann’s famous Uber die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zugrunde liegen (1854). This had been delivered before a nonmathematical audience, and hence was shorn of the underlying analysis. Riemann had broadly indicated a way in which matter might be regarded as an efficient cause of spatial structure, and Clifford went further in making matter (and its motion), electrical phenomena, and so forth a manifestation of the varying curvature of space.
Clifford’s writings in geometry were largely on projective geometry; but in non-Euclidean geometry he did some of his best work, investigating the consequences of adjusting the definitions of parallelism (especially by abandoning the condition of coplanarity). Thus he found that parallels not in the same plane can exist (within current non-Euclidean terms) only in a Riemannian (elliptic) space, and that they do exist. He showed how a certain three parallels define a ruled second-order surface that has a number of interesting properties. The properties of such “Clifford’s surfaces,” as they were later known, were not investigated very deeply by Clifford himself, but Bianchi and Klein made much of them, considering especially an interpretation under which the geometry of the surface was Euclidean.
Elsewhere in his geometrical writings Clifford left memorable results, as in his investigations of the geometrical consequences of extending a method of Cayley’s for forming a product of determinants, in his research into quaternion representations of the most general rigid motion in space, and in his application of the techniques of higher-dimensional geometry to a problem in probability. Simultaneously with Max Noether he proved (1870) that a Cremona transformation may be regarded as a compound of quadratic transformations, and toward the end of his life (1877) he established some important topological equivalences for Riemann surfaces. In all this, Clifford justifies the commonly expressed belief of contemporaries that his early death deprived the world of one of the best mathematicians of his generation.
Clifford is perhaps most widely remembered as a popular writer on mathematics and physics, his work being colored by highly personal philosophical overtones. He played an important part, nevertheless, in introducing the ideas of G. F. B. Riemann and other writers on non-Euclidean geometry to English mathematicians. Clifford added a number of his own ideas to the subject, and these were highly regarded at the time, as were his papers on biquaternions, the classification of loci, and the topology of Riemann surfaces.
It appears that Clifford was highly concerned about religious questions because he studied Thomas Aquinas and learnedly supported the Catholic position. Later, however, he became an agnostic and turned against religion; Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin became the most important influences upon his thinking in many areas.
As a philosopher, Clifford's name is chiefly associated with two phrases of his coining, "mind-stuff" and the "tribal self". The former symbolizes his metaphysical conception, suggested to him by his reading of Spinoza. The other phrase, "tribal self", gives the key to Clifford's ethical view, which explains conscience and the moral law by the development in each individual of a "self", which prescribes the conduct conducive to the welfare of the "tribe."
Royal Society
Clifford was a first-class gymnast, whose repertory apparently included hanging by his toes from the crossbar of a weathercock on a church tower, a feat befitting a High Churchman, as he then was. His health began to fail, however, when Clifford was barely thirty.
On 7 April 1875, Clifford married Lucy Lane, of Barbados. His wife and two daughters survived him, and Mrs. Clifford subsequently became well-known as a novelist and dramatist.
