Category: Hopkins History
First Greek Prof, Basil Gildersleeve
September 18, 2000
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Johns Hopkins’ first professor of Greek, was born in 1831 in Charleston, S.C., and was orphaned at a young age. Gildersleeve proved to be a precocious child who early on displayed a hunger for classical learning. His determination took him first to the College of Charleston, then to Jefferson College in Pennsylvania and on to Princeton, where he earned his bachelor’s degree at the age of 18. He then went to Europe for advanced studies, earning his doctorate at Gottingen in 1853, at the age of 22. Returning to the United States, he became professor of Greek at the University of Virginia in 1856.
Ira Remsen: The Chemistry Was Right
September 11, 2000
Ira Remsen was born Feb. 10, 1846, in New York City, of Dutch and Huguenot ancestry. Following education in the public schools, he attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons, from which he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1867. Although briefly a practicing physician, he had studied medicine only to please his parents. After satisfying this family obligation, Remsen left for Munich to pursue his real interest: chemistry. He spent a year in Munich and then transferred to Gottingen, where he studied under the prominent chemist Rudolph Fittig and earned his doctorate in 1870. He then followed Fittig to Tubingen, where he was an assistant for two years.
A Faculty For Physics: Henry Rowland
July 17, 2000
When Daniel Gilman was appointed president of The Johns Hopkins University in 1875, the trustees, none of whom were educators, left the matter of recruiting a faculty in his hands. With an eye to the future, Gilman sought to fill the ranks with “young scholars of promise,” likely to become important figures in their fields. Gilman solicited recommendations for students or former students, or younger colleagues respected by their peers. In the discipline of physics, one name often repeated was Henry Augustus Rowland.
Math’s No. 1 Faculty Member: James Joseph Sylvester
March 20, 2000
When James Joseph Sylvester came to The Johns Hopkins University in 1876, he was the most senior of the original faculty, in terms of age and prior accomplishments. The university’s first professor of mathematics, the 61-year-old Sylvester had already had a full career in both academia and private business. Alternately brilliant and erratic, warm and irascible, benevolent and egocentric, Sylvester helped propel the infant university to the forefront of scholarly attention soon after his arrival in Baltimore.Born in 1814 to the family of a Jewish merchant in London, Sylvester showed mathematical talent at an early age. Barred from most universities because of his religion, he entered the University of London at the age of 14. After a number of false starts, Sylvester passed his examinations at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Because he could not subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, however, Sylvester was denied his degree and any hope of competing for prizes and fellowships. He later succeeded in earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Trinity College, Dublin. Seeing opportunities in the United States, he took up residence at the University of Virginia, where he assumed the chair of mathematics in 1841.