Morris Birkbeck Pell

Morris Birkbeck Pell (31 March 1827, Albion, Illinois, USA – 7 May 1879, Glebe, New South Wales, Australia) was an American-Australian mathematician, professor, lawyer and actuary. He became the inaugural Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1852, and continued in the role until ill health enforced his retirement in 1877. He was for many years a member of the University Senate, and councillor and secretary of the Royal Society of New South Wales.

Pell's mother Eliza (1797-1880) was a daughter of Morris Birkbeck (1764-1825), the English agricultural innovator, social reformer and antislavery campaigner. In 1817-18 Birkbeck, with George Flower, had founded a utopian colony, the English Settlement, in the Illinois Territory of the United States, and Birkbeck laid out the new town there of Albion, Illinois. A widower since 1804, Birkbeck had brought his seven children with him to America, and it was there that his daughter Eliza met and married Gilbert Titus Pell (1796-1860), who came from a prominent family of New York politicians. Pell was descended from Sir John Pell (1643-1702), Lord of Pelham Manor, New York, who was the son of English mathematician Dr. John Pell, and nephew and heir of early American pioneer and settler Thomas Pell. Gilbert Pell served as a representative in the Illinois legislature, and in the 1850s was appointed United States envoy to Mexico.

Morris Pell was born of this union in the new settlement of Albion in 1827, but Eliza Birkbeck Pell became estranged from her husband, and eventually returned to England with her son. In 1849 Pell graduated as Senior Wrangler in mathematics at Cambridge University—a position once regarded as "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain."

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