Sir Donald MacAlister, 1st Baronet of Tarbet (17 May 1854 – 15 January 1934) was a Scottish physician who was Principal and Vice-Chancellor and, later, Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles intellectual secret society, from 1876. From 1904 to 1931 he was President of the General Medical Council. Early life Donald MacAlister was born in Perth, on 17 May 1854, the son of Daniel MacAlister (also spelt MacAllister), a publisher's agent and book-deliverer, living at 2 Earls Dykes in Perth who later went to live in Liverpool to work for Blackie and Son. His mother was Euphemia Kennedy and his younger brother, born in 1856, was Sir John MacAlister. He was cousin to Hugh Macalister. He rose in life from humble beginnings via school at the Liverpool Institute for Boys (founded 1825, closed 1985) to achieve the highest score in the final mathematics examinations at the University of Cambridge in 1877. In November 1877, he was elected a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was a native speaker of Gaelic. Academic career and later life MacAlister remained a fellow of St. John's College until the end of his life, and was senior tutor from 1900 to 1904. In 1879, he published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on "The Law of the Geometric Mean." The work was in response to a question put by Francis Galton and contains what is now called the log-normal distribution. After a spell teaching mathematics at Harrow School, MacAlister returned to his original intention of studying medicine, first at Cambridge, later in 1879 at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and for a short time at Leipzig. In 1881, he settled in Cambridge, and took up medical teaching, investigation, and practice, and in 1884, when he graduated M.D., became physician to Addenbrooke's Hospital. He was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1886. In addition to his great talent in mathematics and his accomplishments in medicine, MacAlister was also an extraordinary linguist. In addition to his native Gaelic and English, he was said to have spoken well German, Norse, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Basque, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Swedish, Russian, Serbian, Afrikaans and Romany: nineteen languages total. MacAlister was a contemporary at St. John's of the first Japanese graduate of Cambridge named Kikuchi Dairoku and they were lifelong friends. MacAlister also assisted Inagaki