Thomas Archer Hirst

I remember, however, that here mathematics was my favourite study ..." He left the school at fifteen to work as an apprentice engineer in Halifax, surveying for proposed railway lines.

Hirst married Anna Martin in 1854, and spent much of the decade of the 1850s on the European continent, where he socialised with many mathematicians, and used his inherited wealth to support himself.

He was appointed Professor of Physics at University College London in 1865, and he succeeded Augustus De Morgan to the Chair of Mathematics at UCL in 1867.

[3][4] In his early days, Hirst wrote extensively in his notebooks (sometimes called the Journal), recording everything he read and much of what he was thinking about.

We know, for example, what the effect was of his reading the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, that epoch-making book authored anonymously by Robert Chambers which promoted the idea of evolution in 1844.

It is the reading practice of a self-improving autodidact, shaped by Bible-reading amongst denominations of learned liberal Dissent... Hirst copied large chunks into his journal... the journal shows that Hirst moved between Vestiges and other related works such as Paley's Natural Theology and John Arthur Phillips' Geology of Yorkshire..."[5]Both Hirst and Tyndall left in their journals and letters evidence that Vestiges (especially its geological evidence) made a good case against the story of Genesis and the case for divine intervention; yet they were not atheists.