Thomas Muir (mathematician)

Sir Thomas Muir CMG FRS FRSE[1] (25 August 1844 – 21 March 1934) was a Scottish mathematician, remembered as an authority on determinants.

In his 1882 work, Muir rediscovered an important lemma that was first proved by Cayley 35 years earlier:[5] In Glasgow he lived at Beechcroft in the Bothwell district.

[6] In 1874 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, His proposers were William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, Hugh Blackburn, Philip Kelland and Peter Guthrie Tait.

Shortly after his arrival at the Cape, the Uitenhage Public School in the Eastern Cape, originally established in 1822 by Scots educator James Rose Innes, was renamed the Muir Academy, later becoming Muir College, which is nowadays believed to be the oldest secondary school in South Africa.

From 1906 onwards he published a five-volume expansion of his history of determinants, the final part (1929) taking the theory to 1920.