Burnside, William (1852-1927)

English mathematician. He made advances in automorphic functions, group theory (he published the first book in English on this subject in 1897), and the theory of probability.

Burnside was born in London and educated at Cambridge, where he became a lecturer. In 1885 he left Cambridge to take up the chair of mathematics at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London; he retired in 1919.

Burnside's study of elliptic functions led him, over the years, to study the functions of real variables and the theory of functions in general. One of his most influential papers, written in 1892, was a development of some work by French mathematician Henri Poincaré on automorphic functions.

His study of automorphic functions in turn brought him to the field of group theory, particularly the theory of the discontinuous group of finite order. The revised edition of his book on group theory in 1911 is considered a standard work. A nearly completed manuscript on probability theory was published after his death.