Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Collected Mathematical Papers of Arthur Cayley, Vol. 8
So also was another story, belonging to a later part of his life, according to which he is reported to have said that the object of law was to say a thing in the greatest number of words, and of mathematics to say it in the fewest: this view, and the possibility of his ever having held it, he repudiated entirely.
N ovel-readers are more frequent in Cambridge now than they appear to have been in 1842, and Cayley in his later days avoided reading some of the modern novels but it is worth noting, as will subsequently be seen more in detail, that he had this popular weakness all his life.
He was admitted a scholar of the College on lst May, 1840, winning his scholar ship at the earliest time when it was possible to do so: and he secured a first class in each of the annual examinations of the College. No record of marks for the first and the second years is given in the Trinity Head Examiner's Book; but in the third year the marks are given and, as he then scored more than twice the marks of the second candidate, the Head Examiner separated him from the rest of the first class by drawing a line under his name. This presage of his powers was confirmed in the following year, 1842, when he graduated as Senior Wrangler; the Examiners were so definitely satisfied that he was first as to dispense in his case with the viva voce tests which at that time were a customary part of the Tripos. And in due course the first Smith's Prize was awarded to him in the succeeding examination.
Cayley's own year at Trinity was a distinguished one; for, in addition to himself, it contained Mr. (now the Right Honourable) George Denman, for many years a Judge of the High Court of Justice, and Mr. Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, one of the foremost of Latin Scholars of any period. And the distinction of Cayley's contemporaries in neighbouring years is marked: it is impossible to avoid noticing the names of some of the graduates in the Mathematical Tripos about that time. Sylvester and Green (second and fourth wranglers respectively in Leslie Ellis (senior in Stokes (senior in Cayley (senior in Adams (senior in Thomson - now Lord Kelvin - (second in constitute an extraordinary succession of mathematicians of whom England is justly proud. Their achievements in mathematical science have done much to render their University one of the acknowledged chief mathematical schools of the world.
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