Edward Ffrench Bromhead

Sir Edward Thomas Ffrench Bromhead (March 26, 1789 – March 14, 1855), second baronet, was an Irish mathematician. Born in Dublin, he was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society in 1817, after his paper "On the fluents of irrational functions" was published by the society's Philosophical Transactions the year before. He was a member of the Analytical Society—along with Charles Babbage, George Peacock, and Sir John Herschel—whose primary goal was to see in England the adoption of the Leibnizian notation for the calculus over Newton's notation. Bromhead supported and encouraged the mathematicians George Boole and George Green.

Bromhead has a botanical author abbreviation; the orders Asparagales, Arecales, Brassicales, Fabales, Lamiales, and Magnoliales were named by him.

In his later years, he suffered from progressive blindness. He died at Thurlby Hall, Thurlby in 1855.

References

• A. W. F. Edwards, "Bromhead, Sir Edward Thomas Ffrench, second baronet (1789–1855)", rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed September, 2006 (subscription required).