Joseph Howard Mathews

Joseph Howard Mathews (1880 – April 15, 1970) was an American physical chemist, university professor, and expert on firearm identification. Mathews was Chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for 33 years (1919–1952).

Mathews was raised on a dairy farm near the unincorporated community of Auroraville, Wisconsin in Waushara County, Wisconsin. As a youth, he had little interest in farm life or in the cheese factory operated by his older brother. His parents sent Joseph to public school in nearby Berlin, a city that straddles the boundary between Waushara and Green Lake counties. He graduated from Omro High School (Omro, Winnebago County). Mathews studied briefly at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin. Mathews earned the B.S. in chemistry in 1903, writing a senior thesis on nitrosyl selenic acid, based on research under the supervision of Victor Lenher (1873–1927).

After a short stint as an analytical chemist at the consulting firm of H. S. Mitchell in Milwaukee, Mathews returned to Madison as a graduate student of physical chemist Louis Albrecht Kahlenberg (1870–1941), Chair of the Department of Chemistry. Kahlenberg, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, had been a doctoral student in Leipzig of Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932), one of the founders of the field of physical chemistry. Mathews' research correlated electrical conductivity and chemical activity. He received the M.Sc. in 1905. Mathews then went to Harvard to study with Theodore William Richards (1868–1928). While Richards was on leave as an exchange professor at the University of Berlin, Mathews obtained a temporary instructorship in physical and industrial chemistry at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland. Mathews returned to Harvard in 1907, completing his doctorate in 1908 with T. W. Richards. He then became an Instructor of Physical Chemistry. Kahlenberg gave lectures in the Physical Chemistry course, and Mathews taught the laboratory.

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