Although, as a newly qualified graduate, he had been formally appointed to a professorship at the University of Virginia in 1841, WASP feeling among both the local community and the trustees of the institution, allied to disgusting racial slurs heaped on him by the undergraduates he taught, forced Sylvester to resign after just six months. However, anti-semitism in the academic community continued to dog the man. It was only in 1841, when Trinity College, Dublin awarded him the degrees he needed that Sylvester was officially qualified to teach students. A year later, and still without a degree, Sylvester was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of London, where he had been a student for a short time from the age of 14. Nor was he permitted to compete for a fellowship or obtain a Smith’s prize. Today, when we are so aware of discrimination against minorities, mathematicians who admire the astonishing achievements of the Jewish-born James Joseph Sylvester (1814- 97) invariably pick up on the fact that despite being ranked second wrangler in the 1837 Cambridge University Tripos, Sylvester, as someone who as a Jew had refused to take the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England, was barred from graduating. At the latter University, woman were palmed off with 'certificates' up to that date. At around about the same time, when the first colleges for women were established, similar restrictions were applied to women, who were only granted degrees at Oxford in 1920, and shamefully, at Cambridge in 1948. The rule among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge up to the end of the nineteenth century was that you were permitted to take a degree at these 'august' institutions as long as you weren’t a dissenter or a Jew.

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