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Almost the only English mathematician at the beginning of this century who used analytical methods, and whose work requires mention here, is Ivory, to whom the celebrated theorem in attractions is due. Sir James Ivory was born in Dundee in 1765, and died on September 21, 1842. After graduating at St. Andrews he became the managing partner in a flax-spinning company in Forfarshire, but continued to devote most of his leisure to mathematics. In 1804 he was made professor at the Royal Military College at Marlow, which was subsequently moved to Sandhurst; he was knighted in 1831. He contributed numerous papers to the Philosophical Transactions, the most remarkable being those on attractions. In one of these, in 1809, he shewed how the attraction of a homogeneous ellipsoid on an external point is a multiple of that of another ellipsoid on an internal point: the latter can be easily obtained. He criticized Laplace's solution of the method of least squares with unnecessary bitterness, and in terms which shewed that he had failed to understand it.
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