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Frank Morley entered King's College Cambridge in 1879, having won an open scholarship. However ill health disrupted his undergraduate course and he was forced to take an extra year because of these health problems. Morley only achieved the eighth place in the First Class Honours. To say 'only' here may seem strange since this was an extremely good result in an examination which saw Mathews first and Whitehead fourth. Richmond writes in [4], however:-
Ill health beyond all doubt had prevented him from doing himself justice, but the disappointment was keen. In middle life he was loath to speak of his student days...
Morley graduated from Cambridge with a B.A. in 1884 and taught mathematics at Bath College until 1887. He settled in the United States and was appointed an instructor at the Quaker College in Haverford, Pennsylvania in 1887. The following year he was promoted to professor.
At Haverford, Morley worked, not with others at the College, but with the mathematicians Scott and Harkness, both also graduates of Cambridge, England, who were at Bryn Mawr which was close to Haverford.
Morley wrote mainly on geometry but also on algebra. His own favourite among his geometry papers was On the Lueroth quartic curve which he published in 1919. He is perhaps best known, however, for a theorem which is now known as Morley's Theorem:-
If the angles of any triangle be trisected, the triangle, formed by the meets of pairs of trisectors, each pair being adjacent to the same side, is equilateral.
Morley loved posing mathematical problems and over a period of 50 years, starting in his undergraduate days, he published over 60 problems in the Educational Times. Most are of a geometric nature. Here is an example, see [1]:-
Show that on a chess-board the number of squares visible is 204, and the number of rectangles (including squares) visible is 1296; and that, on a similar board with n squares in each side, the number of squares is the sum of the first n square numbers, and the number of rectangles (including squares) is the sum of the first n cube numbers.
In fact Morley was an exceptionally good chess player, so the problem above reflects one of his hobbies. He played at the highest level and beat Lasker on one occasion while Lasker was World Chess Champion.
He is described by Cohen in [2] as:-
... a striking figure in any group. Deliberate in manner and speech, there was a suggestion of shyness about him. He was generally very well informed and interested in a strikingly wide range of subjects. He was of an artistic temperament. While many of his papers and lectures seemed involved to the uninitiated, they all possessed a characteristic artistic charm.
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