William Trail or Traill

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...

MRIA (23 June 1746 – 3 February 1831) was a Scots-born mathematician, remembered for his mathematical text books. For the majority of his life, he served church duties in Northern Ireland.

Life

Sources are unclear on Trail's parentage. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states he was the son of the Rev. William Trail (1712–1756), minister of St Monance, Fife, and Mary Trail (1731–1756). The

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

states he was the son of the Rev. James Traill. James left Scotland in 1756 to minister in Northern Ireland and in 1765 became Bishop of Down and Connor, dying in 1783. Through his grandmother Agnes Trail, the younger William was related to the mathematician George Lewis Scott and the two were frequent correspondents. In 1759, he entered in Marischal College ( Aberdeen) and in 1763 he moved to University of Glasgow where he studied under Robert Simson and graduated M.A. in 1766., page 192 In 1766 he was successful to obtain the chair of mathematics in Marischal College (in competition with John Playfair and Robert Hamilton). In 1779 he resigned the professorship, and moved to Northern Ireland as Chancellor of

Down and Connor The Diocese of Down and Connor, ( ga, Deoise an Dúin agus Chonaire) is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Catholic Church in Northern Ireland. It is one of eight suffragan dioceses in the ecclesiastical province of the ...

church under his father, the bishop. He remained thereafter in the Church of Ireland, playing his religious duties for the following forty years. In 1783 he was in Edinburgh as one of the joint founders of the

. He retired to

Bath, Somerset Bath () is a city in the Bath and North East Somerset unitary area in the county of Somerset, England, known for and named after its Roman-built baths. At the 2021 Census, the population was 101,557. Bath is in the valley of the River Avon, ...

with his wife around 1821 and died there on 3 February 1831.

Publications

In 1770 he published ''Elements of Algebra for the use of Students in Universities'' which was his most famous opera and became a very popular book. Trail is also well known by a biography of Robert Simson published in 1812; as biography it is not well-regarded, though it does give a lot of first-hand information about Simson and his geometrical studies., page 87

Family

In 1799 he married Lady Frances Charteris (1754-1848) eldest daughter of Francis Wemyss-Charteris and granddaughter of the Duke of Gordon. She was 45 years old when they married and they did not have children. She died in Bath in 1848.

References

Bibliography

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External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Trail, William 1746 births 1831 deaths 18th-century Scottish people 18th-century Scottish mathematicians Alumni of the University of Aberdeen Scottish mathematicians