John Hewitt Jellett

John Hewitt Jellett (25 December 1817 – 19 February 1888) was an Irish mathematician whose career was spent at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where he rose to the rank of Provost. He was also a priest in the Church of Ireland.

Life

He was the son of Rev. Morgan Jellett (c. 1787–1832) and his wife Harriette Townsend, daughter of Hewitt Baldwin Poole, Esq. (died 1800), of County Cork, by his wife Dorothea Morris. He was born at Cashel, County Tipperary, and educated at Kilkenny College and at TCD, where he became a fellow in 1840.^[1]

John Hewitt Jellett married his cousin on his mothers side, Dorothea Charlotte Morris Morgan (c. 1824–1911), daughter of James Morgan, on 7 July 1855. He was father-in-law to the noted Irish physicist George Francis FitzGerald. He died at the provost's house, TCD, on 19 February 1888, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery on 23 February.

Career

He graduated B.A. in mathematics in 1837, M.A. 1843, B.D. 1866, and D.D. 1881. He had been ordained a priest in 1846. In 1848 he was elected to the chair of natural philosophy at TCD, and in 1868 he received the appointment of commissioner of Irish national education.

In 1851 he was awarded the Cunningham Medal of the Royal Irish Academy for his work on the "Calculus of Variations".^[2] The society later elected him their president, a position he held from 1869 to 1874.^[3]

In 1870, on the death of Dr. Thomas Luby, he was co-opted a Senior Fellow, and thus a member of the Board of TCD. Gladstone's government in February 1881 appointed Jellett provost of Trinity; in the same year he was awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society.

After the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland he took an active part in the deliberations of the general synod and in every work calculated to advance its interests. He was an able mathematician, and wrote A Treatise of the Calculus of Variations (1850), and A Treatise on the Theory of Friction (1872), as well as several papers on pure and applied mathematics, articles in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy.^[3] He also wrote some theological essays, sermons, and religious treatises, of which the principal were An Examination of some of the Moral Difficulties of the Old Testament (1867), and The Efficacy of Prayer (1878).

References

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Jellett, John Hewitt". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.