Smith, Henry John Stephen (1826–1883)

Irish mathematician, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford 1860–83. A leading authority on the theory of numbers, he wrote an influential report on the subject for the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Born in Dublin, Smith was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was elected a Fellow. He was posthumously awarded the prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his work on the representation of integers as sums of five and seven squares (sharing the prize with Hermann Minkowski, who had used vital research published by Smith to obtain his results). He also worked on elliptic functions and geometry.