Clifford, William Kingdon (1845-1879), mathematician and philosopher of science

During his short life William Kingdon Clifford made significant contributions to various areas of mathematics, especially geometry, and through his many public lectures and writings he was a prominent participant in the intellectual debates of his age, particularly as a supporter and populariser of scientific thinking and as an opponent of religious dogma. He was born at Exeter in 1845, the son of a bookseller, and educated at King’s College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1868. In 1870 he travelled to the Mediterranean with an expedition from the Royal Astronomical Society to view a solar eclipse, and the next year he exchanged his fellowship for the chair of applied mathematics at University College, London. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1874. In 1875 he married Lucy Lane, later a writer, with whom he had two daughters, but in 1876 he experienced the first symptoms of the lung disease which was to trouble the remainder of his life. Attempts were made to restore his health by foreign travel, but these were of only temporary effect, and he died at Madeira in 1879, aged just thirty-three.