Robert Richard Anstice

Robert Richard Anstice (1813–1853) was an English clergyman and mathematician who wrote two remarkable papers on combinatorics, published the same year he died in the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal. He pioneered the use of primitive roots in this field, anticipating the work of Eugen Netto on Steiner's triplets.

Anstice studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1835, receiving a Master's in 1837. Nothing is known about his life in the next ten years. In 1846, he was ordained priest, and in the following year he became rector of Wigginton, Hertfordshire. He died there in 1853, and is buried, under a cast iron tombstone, in the churchyard at St Michael's Church, Madeley, Shropshire.