Professor Hector Munro Macdonald, one of Europe’s foremost mathematicians, died on the 16th of

Professor Hector Munro Macdonald, one of Europe’s foremost mathematicians, died on the 16th of May, 1935.

Hector was born in Edinburgh in 1865, the son of Donald MacDonald, originally of Kiltearn, Ross-shire, and his wife Annie, daughter of Hector Munro of Kiltearn.

Hector’s earliest education was in Edinburgh, but after  his parents movrf the family to Fearn, in Easter Ross, he went to school there, and afterwards to the Royal Academy, Tain, Old Aberdeen Grammar School, and the University of Aberdeen, where he graduated in 1886 with First-Class Honours in Mathematics and won a Fullerton Scholarship.

Macdonald proceeded to Cambridge after completing his first degree in Scotland. Entering Clare College, Cambridge, as a foundation scholar, he graduated in the Mathematical Tripos of 1889, was awarded a fellowship at Clare in the following year and, in 1891, was awarded the second Smith’s Prize.

In 1901 he received the Adams Prize and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (FRS). He was awarded the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in 1916.

Macdonald held his fellowship at Clare College until 1908 and in 1914 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of his former College. From 1916 to 1918 he served as President of the London Mathematical Society. During World War I, Macdonald did war service in London attached to the Ministry of Munitions where he dealt with wages. He was transferred to the Ministry of Labour in 1916, where he remained until 1919. 

Macdonald worked on electric waves and solved difficult problems regarding diffraction of these waves by summing series of Bessel functions. He corrected his 1903 solution to the problem of a perfectly conducting sphere embedded in an infinite *geneous dielectric in 1904 after a subtle error was pointed out by Poincaré. The major problem which he tackled was that of wireless waves. About the time that Macdonald published his prize winning essay on electric waves, Guglielmo Marconi was successful in the transmission of the first wireless signals across the Atlantic. However this posed a major problem at first because wireless signals, like light, should not be capable of being bent round the surface of the earth as apparently Marconi wireless signals were. Macdonald suggested that the wireless waves were being refracted by the atmosphere. It is now known that in fact the waves are reflected by the ionosphere.

Macdonald became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Aberdeen in 1905 and remained at the University for the rest of his life.

Pics are of Hector and his grave at St Machar’s Cathedral Aberdeen.