Henry Wilbraham was an obscure English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 mathematician. His only noteworthy accomplishment was discovering and explaining the Gibbs phenomenon

Gibbs phenomenon

In mathematics, the Gibbs phenomenon, named after the American physicist J. Willard Gibbs, is the peculiar manner in which the Fourier series of a piecewise continuously differentiable periodic function behaves at a jump discontinuity: the nth partial sum of the Fourier series has large...

 nearly fifty years before J. Willard Gibbs did. Gibbs and Maxime Bôcher

Maxime Bôcher

Maxime Bôcher was an American mathematician who published about 100 papers on differential equations, series, and algebra. He also wrote elementary texts such as Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry. Bôcher's theorem, Bôcher's equation, and the Bôcher Memorial Prize are named after him.-Life:Bôcher...

, as well as nearly everyone else, were unaware of Wilbraham's work on the Gibbs phenomenon.

Biography

Henry Wilbraham was born to George and Lady Anne Wilbraham. His family was privileged, with his father a parliamentarian and his mother the daughter of the Earl Fortescue

Hugh Fortescue, 1st Earl Fortescue

Hugh Fortescue, 1st Earl Fortescue was a British peer, the son of Matthew Fortescue, 2nd Baron Fortescue, younger half-brother of an earlier Hugh Fortescue , 1st Baron Fortescue, 14th Baron Clinton and 1st Earl Clinton.He married Hester Grenville , daughter of George Grenville, on 10 May 1782...

. He attended Harrow School

Harrow School

Harrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London.. The school is of worldwide renown. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School we know today was...

 before being admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...

 at the age of 16. He received a BA in 1846 and an MA in 1849 from Cambridge. At the age of 22 he published his paper on the Gibbs phenomenon. He remained at Trinity as a Fellow until 1856. In 1864 he married Mary Jane Marriott, and together they had seven children. In the last years of his life, he was the District Registrar of the Chancery Court

Chancery Court

The Chancery Court of York is an ecclesiastical court for the Province of York of the Church of England.The presiding officer, the Official Principal and Auditor, has been the same person as the Dean of the Arches since the nineteenth century . The Court comprises the Auditor, two clergy and two...

 at Manchester

Manchester

Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...

.