William McFadden Orr, 1866-1934

Abstract

William McFadden Orr was born on May 2, 1866, and died in his sixty-eighth year on August 14, 1934, having resigned his professorship of Pure and Applied Mathematics in University College, Dublin, less than a year before. Coming from Comber, Co. Down, to the Methodist College, Belfast, he learned Mathematics from James A. MacNeill, a very successful teacher of that day, afterwards head master of Campbell College. Mathematical teaching in Irish schools was then concentrated on geometry, and the more gifted boys went a long way with the textbooks of Townsend, Casey, and Nixon. This was probably due to the influence of the great succession of geometers in Trinity College, Dublin. Orr’s own bent for analysis took him away from pure geometry in his main work of later life, but even as late as his candidature for Fellowship at St. John’s, Cambridge, he was occupying himself with extensions of Feuerbach’s theorem about systems of circles.