William Burnside was born on July 2, 1852, in London. In 1871, he entered Cambridge University and was considered the best of his college class. After graduating in 1875, Burnside was appointed lecturer at Cambridge, where he stayed until 1885. He then accepted a position at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich and spent the rest of his career in that post.
Burnside wrote more than 150 research papers in many fields. Most of his early papers were devoted to applied mathematics, principally hydrodynamics. He also published papers on differential geometry, elliptic functions, and probability theory. He is best remembered, however, for his pioneering work in group theory, which appeared in some 50 papers, and his classic book entitled Theory of Groups. Because of his emphasis on the abstract approach, many consider Burnside to have been the first pure theorist.
One mark of greatness in a mathematician is the ability to pose important and challenging problems -- problems that open up new areas of research for future generations. Here, Burnside excelled. It has he who first conjectured that a group of odd order is solvable (that is, that the group G has a series of normal subgroups). This extremely important conjecture was finally proved more than 50 years later by Feit and Thompson in a 255-page paper. [For more conjectures by Burnside, refer to Contemporary Abstract Algebra, Gallian, 1994]
Burnside was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded two Royal medals. He served as president of the Council of the London Mathematical Society and received their De Morgan medal. Burnside died on August 21, 1927.