Philip Kelland

Philip Kelland PRSE FRS (17 October 1808 – 8 May 1879 ) was an English mathematician. He was known mainly for his great influence on the development of education in Scotland.

Life Kelland was born in 1808 the son of Philip Kelland (d.1847), curate in Dunster, Somerset, England. He was educated at Sherborne, and was an undergraduate at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was tutored privately by English mathematician William Hopkins and graduated in 1834 as senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman. He was ordained in the Church of England. From 1834 to 1838, he was a fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge.

He lived his final years at 20 Clarendon Crescent in western Edinburgh.

Kelland is buried in Warriston Cemetery in the north of the city.

Academic career Kelland was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in 1838. He was a successor to Scottish mathematician William Wallace. He became the first English-born and wholly English-educated mathematician to hold that chair.

Kelland wrote analytical papers on General Differentiation in 1839, and Differential Equations in 1853. He gave a geometrical Theory of Parallels outlining a version of non-Euclidean geometry. He wrote mathematics books and edited works of mathematician John Playfair and polymath Thomas Young.