Portrait of the English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, 1814-1897. Born into a Jewish family Sylvester had to fight anti-semitism during his turbulent career. He was sent down from London University, and subsequently studied in Liverpool, Cambridge and Dublin. He taught in London briefly, and then unsuccessfully for a few months at the University of Virginia. He returned to London and became a barrister, and met Cayley, who rekindled his interest in mathematics. He worked on algebraic invariance (which assumed great importance in quantum mechanics and relativity theory), on roots of quintic equations and on number theory. He was professor at Oxford from 1833