George William Hill

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Born: 3 March 1838 in New York, USA
Died: 16 April 1914 in West Nyack, New York, USA

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In 1846 George Hill's family moved to West Nyack where George attended school. After graduating from school he studied at Rutgers University graduating in 1859. The following year he began his study of the lunar theory of Delaunay and Hansen. He was to continue this study for twelve years before he produced any publications of his own.

In 1861 Hill joined the Nautical Almanac Office working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After two years he returned to West Nyack where he worked from his home. Except for a period of 10 years from 1882 to 1892 when he worked in Washington on the theory and tables for the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, this was to be his working pattern for the rest of his life.

Writing in [4], E W Brown says:-

He was essentially of the type of scholar and investigator who seems to feel no need of personal contacts with others. While the few who knew him speak of the pleasure of his companionship in frequent tramps over the country surrounding Washington, he was apparently quite happy alone, whether at work or taking recreation.

Hill was the first to use infinite determinants to study the orbit of the Moon (1877). His Researches in Lunar Theory appeared in 1878 in the new American Journal of Mathematics. This publication contains important new ideas on the three-body problem. He also introduced infinite determinants and other methods to give increased accuracy to his results. Brown wrote in 1915 that Hill's memoir Researches in Lunar Theory :-

.. of but fifty quarto pages has become fundamental for the development of celestial mechanics in three different directions. ... Poincaré's remark that in it we may perceive the germ of all progress which has been made in celestial mechanics since its publication is doubtless fully justified.

Newcomb persuaded Hill to develop a theory of the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn and Hill's work is a major contribution to mathematical astronomy. Hill's most important work dealt with the gravitational effects of the planets on the Moon's orbit so in this work he was considering the 4-body problem.

Although he must be considered a mathematician, his mathematics was entirely based on that necessary to solve his orbits problems. He had no interest in any modern developments in other areas of mathematics. In fact Hill worked on very similar problems to Adams. In fact Adams was also led to investigate infinite determinants independently of Hill.

From 1898 until 1901 Hill lectured at Columbia University, but [4],

characteristically returned the salary, writing that he did not need the money and that it bothered him to look after it.

Hill became a Fellow of the Royal Society (1902) receiving its Copley Medal in 1909. He was president of the American Mathematical Society from 1894 to 1896. He won the Damoiseau Prize from the Institut de France in 1898, was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1908, elected to the academies of Belgium (1909), Christiania (1910), Sweden (1913) and others.

Texto original por: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

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JOC/EFR October 1997	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
The URL of this page is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Hill.htm