James Joseph Sylvester

Denied his Cambridge degree for decades because of his Jewish faith, James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) overcame institutional prejudice to become a titan of 19th-century mathematics. In 1850, he coined the word 'matrix' from the Latin for womb, describing an array of numbers that generates determinants.

Sylvester spent eight years in the United States as founding professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, where he established the first American graduate program in mathematics and launched the American Journal of Mathematics, before finishing his career as Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford.