John Emory McClintock

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Born: 19 Sept 1840 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania , USA
Died: 10 July 1916 in Bay Head, New Jersey, USA

John McClintock studied at Dickinson College, Carlisle from 1854 until he entered Yale University in 1856. He then studied at Columbia College in New York (later Columbia University) from 1857 receiving his A.B. in 1859.

McClintock spent a year in Europe studying chemistry at the University of Paris and then at Göttingen. He represented the US Consul in England from 1863 to 1866 when he became associated with a banking firm in Paris. Returning to the USA he was an actuary in New York, then in Milwaukee before becoming an actuary in the Mutual Life Insurance Company in New York in 1889 where he remained until he retired in 1911.

In fact McClintock was for many years the leading actuary in America. He published 30 papers between 1868 and 1877 on actuarial questions. His publications were not confined to questions relating to life insurance policies however. He published about 22 papers on mathematical topics. One paper treats difference equations as differential equations of infinite order and others look at quintic equations which are soluble algebraically. Another work is on quadratic residues.

Archibald writes [1]:-

McClintock is known to have expressed regret that he had not followed an academic career, which would have permitted him to give a large share of his time to research... In such a direction he would probably have gone far.

In 1889 when McClintock took up his actuarial post with the Mutual Life Insurance Company in New York, the New York Mathematical Society was just coming into existence. McClintock joined the Society in December 1889 and was elected vice-president of the Society. In the following year he was elected president and he has the distinction of being the only president of the Society to serve for four years.

During McClintock's presidential term, Klein visited the Society and talked on non-euclidean spherical trigonometry. Study also addressed the Society during McClintock's term as president and talked on his work with Engel. When McClintock's term ended he gave the first presidential address to the Society on The past and future of the Society.