which was required by the upper school, and expressed gratitude for being allowed to leave these studies behind and specialise in mathematics. In December 1891 Whittaker received an entrance scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. After completing his education at the Manchester Grammar School he went on to study mathematics and physics there from 1892 to 1895. He entered Trinity College as a minor scholar in October 1892 to study mathematics. Whittaker was the pupil of Andrew Russell Forsyth and George Howard Darwin while at Trinity College and received tutoring throughout his first two years. With an interest more in applied than pure mathematics, Whittaker won the Sheepshanks Astronomical Exhibition in 1894 as an undergraduate. He graduated as Second Wrangler in the Cambridge Tripos examination in 1895. The Senior Wrangler that year was Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich and Whittaker tied John Hilton Grace for second, all three along with three other participants, including Bertram Hopkinson, went on to be elected Fellows of the Royal Society. He also received the Tyson Medal for Mathematics and Astronomy in 1896. Career Whittaker was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1896 to 1906 when took on the role of Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He held this post in Dublin until 1912, when he was appointed chair of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, a role he went on to hold for just over a third of a century. Throughout his career, he wrote papers on automorphic functions and special functions in pure mathematics as well as on electromagnetism, general relativity, numerical analysis and astronomy in applied mathematics and physics, and was also interested in topics in biography, history, philosophy and theology. He also made several important innovations in Edinburgh that had a large impact on mathematical education and societies there. Trinity College, Cambridge In 1896, Whittaker was elected as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained at Cambridge as a teacher until 1906. In 1897, Whittaker was awarded the Smith Prize for his work on the paper "On the connexion of algebraic functions with automorphic functions", published in 1888. In 1902, Whittaker found a general solution to Laplace's equation, which received popular news coverage as a "remarkable discovery", though the mathematician Horace Lamb noted that it did not offer any new features. He also wrote several celebrated books in his early career, publishing A Course of Modern Analysis in 1902 and following it