James Booth (mathematician)

The Revd Dr James Booth, JP, FRS (1806–1878) was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, notable as a mathematician and educationalist.

Born at Lavagh, County Leitrim on 26 August 1806, the son of John Booth (cousin to the Gore-Booth baronets), he entered Trinity College, Dublin in 1825 and was elected scholar in 1829, graduating B.A.

[3] In 1843 he was appointed vice-principal of the Liverpool Collegiate Institution; he had been ordained at Bristol in 1842, and acted there as curate till he moved.

[4] In 1854 he was appointed minister of St. Anne's, Wandsworth, and in 1859 was presented to the vicarage of Stone, Buckinghamshire, by the Royal Astronomical Society, to which the advowson had been given in 1844 by Dr Lee.

The first volume, relating mainly to tangential coordinates and reciprocal polars, was issued in 1873; the second, containing papers on elliptic integrals and one on conic sections, came out in 1877.

Booth was the independent inventor of the tangential coordinates that became known as "Boothian co-ordinates", which, however, were previously introduced by Julius Plücker in 1830 in a paper in Crelle's Journal.

He was also instrumental in preparing the reports on Middle Class Education, issued in 1857 by the society, and in that year he annotated and edited for them Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Albert.