St John's College, St John's Street, Cambridge CB2 1TP, United Kingdom
Miller was educated privately until he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts as the fifth wrangler in mathematics in 1826.
Career
Achievements
Membership
Royal Society
William Hallowes Miller was a member of the Royal Society.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
William Hallowes Miller was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Russian Academy of Sciences
William Hallowes Miller was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
William Hallowes Miller was a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences.
St John's College, St John's Street, Cambridge CB2 1TP, United Kingdom
Miller was educated privately until he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts as the fifth wrangler in mathematics in 1826.
William Hallowes Miller was a Welsh mineralogist. He laid the foundations of modern crystallography.
Background
William Hallowes Miller was born on April 6, 1801, at Velindre near Llandovery, Carmarthenshire, South Wales. His father, Captain Francis Miller, who served in the American war, had a long military ancestry. By his first wife, Captain Miller had three sons, all of whom entered the army, and two daughters. After losing his estate near Boston, Massachusetts, he retired to Wales to the small estate of Velindre near Llandovery and in 1800 married Ann Davies, the daughter of a Welsh vicar. William was the only child of this second marriage; his mother died a few days after his birth, but his father lived to the age of eighty-six, dying in 1820.
Education
Miller was educated privately until he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts as the fifth wrangler in mathematics in 1826. In 1841 came a curious diversion: the statutes of St. John’s College required all fellows to proceed in time to holy orders except for four who should be doctors of medicine, and in order to retain his fellowship, Miller prepared himself for and took the Doctor of Medicine.
In 1829 Miller became a fellow of St. John’s and in 1831 published his first book - written in his characteristically lucid but terse style - The Elements of Hydrostatics and Hydrodynamics, which survived as a standard, though difficult, textbook into the fifties. Another mathematical textbook, An Elementary Treatise on the Differential Calculus, appeared in 1833 and passed through several editions. By then Miller had, in 1832, succeeded William Whewell as professor of mineralogy. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1838. He was obliged to vacate his fellowship on his marriage in 1844. In 1875 he became a fellow of St. John’s again under new statutes. In 1876 he suffered a stroke, which effectively brought his scientific life to a close four years before his death.
Miller’s significant contribution to crystallography was made in A Treatise on Crystallography published in 1839. Miller started with the fundamental assertion that crystallographic reference axes should be parallel to the possible crystal edge. The algebraic advantages of “Millerian indices” were immediately apparent; the crystallographic superiority of Miller’s reciprocal indices over Weiss’s direct indices did not become apparent until Bravais’s development of Haüy’s rudimentary lattice concept in 1848, and not fully appreciated until Bragg’s interpretation of the diffraction of X rays by crystals in 1912. But Miller’s notation had quickly found favor with his contemporaries on grounds of convenience and had already served to codify an immense corpus of morphological observations in a thoroughly well-understood manner.
In the Treatise, Miller had little to say about symmetry, but he explored crystal geometry to the full. The zoning law of Weiss was simplified by the new notation, and zone symbols were defined in familiar form; the equations to the normal and the cos θ formula were developed; and the rational sine ratio, which was to be further developed in A Tract on Crystallography (1863), made its first appearance here. For the representation of three-dimensional angular relationships, Miller followed F. E. Neumann in using spherical projection, but the stereographic projection, which subsequently acquired greater currency, and the gnomonic projection were discussed in the final chapter.
The new edition (1852) of William Phillips’ Elementary Introduction to Mineralogy by H. J. Brooke and W. H. Miller was an entirely new book largely written, as Brooke states in the preface, by Miller, and it represents his principal contribution to mineralogy. It incorporated a vast amount of accurate goniometric data provided by Miller himself; it followed the Treatise in using spherical projection, and it made a tentative start in the use of polarized light for the characterization of transparent minerals. The Introduction, like the Treatise, soon eclipsed its contemporaries; it inspired Des Cloizeaux to produce his more elaborate Manuel de minéralogie (Paris, 1862-1893) and determined the form of all subsequent texts on descriptive mineralogy.
In 1843 Miller branched out into a new field on appointment to the parliamentary committee concerned with the preparation of new standards of length and weight consequent on the destruction of the old standards in the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834. His exceptionally accurate work was responsible for the construction of the new standard of weight. In 1870 he was appointed to the Commission Internationale du Mètre.
William Hallowes Miller was a member of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the committee as well as on the Royal Commission which oversaw these new standards.
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Russian Academy of Sciences
,
Russia
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
,
Kingdom of Prussia
Personality
Miller was generous and hospitable to a point, yet remarkably spartan in his way of life. His ingenuity in constructing surprisingly accurate apparatus from simple, often homely, materials was notable. While no great traveler, he obviously enjoyed his trips to Paris for meetings of the Meter Commission, and he regularly holidayed in the Italian Tirol, where he simply enjoyed the scenery while his wife sketched it.
Interests
traveling
Connections
Miller married Harriet Susan Minty on 5 November 1844, the daughter of R. V. Minty, a retired civil servant. They had two sons and four daughters.