William Parkinson Wilson

---

William Parkinson Wilson (1826-1874), professor of mathematics, was born at Peterborough, Northamptonshire, England, and baptized on 1 February 1826, son of John Wilson, silversmith, and his wife Elizabeth, née Parkinson.
Educated at the Cathedral Grammar School, Peterborough, he won a sizarship (a maintenance grant to an undergraduate) at St John's College, Cambridge, and was admitted in February 1843 (B.A., 1847; M.A., 1850); and became a fellow of St John's in 1847-57, in August 1849 he became founding professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Belfast.
In 1850 he published A Treatise on Dynamics.

In 1854 Wilson was chosen as professor of mathematics, pure and mixed, at the newly established University of Melbourne.
One of the four foundation professors, he arrived in Melbourne on 31 January 1855 and gave the university's first lecture on 13 April. Besides Euclid, trigonometry, algebra, analytical geometry and calculus, Wilson taught in the B.A. course natural philosophy 'illustrated by models and experiments'; he spent £500 on apparatus in the first year.

In a two-year course he lectured on mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, heat, meteorology, optics, astronomy, electricity and magnetism. He also set and corrected the matriculation papers in mathematics.
In 1858 he devised the first engineering course at an Australian university and the three-year course leading to a certificate of civil engineering was begun in 1861.

Wilson deplored what he termed an 'incomplete' university without residential colleges to provide moral and religious education, the encouragement of study after graduation, tutorial teaching, training for the clergy, and the cultivation of 'university spirit and feeling'. In September 1865 he became secretary of a committee set up to found an Anglican college at the university.

In 1872 Trinity College was opened and he was a trustee from November 1871 and secretary of its first council.

He was keenly interested in astronomy and in Belfast had founded and directed an observatory.
In November 1856 in a paper read before the Philosophical Institute he advocated Melbourne as the site for the southern hemisphere observatory so long planned by the Royal Society, London; a committee was formed to induce the government to achieve Wilson's 'noble object'.
In June 1858 he demonstrated a model of a 4-ft (122 cm) reflector for the proposed Melbourne observatory, which opened in 1863. He lived in Wolfdene, where he established an observatory as part of the transit of Venus observations on 9 December 1874.
On 11 December he died of apoplexy, aged 48. He was buried in the Moorooduc cemetery.

A little man of fiery temperament, Wilson was at times outspoken and punctilious but was never factious.

Built in 1858 as the Mornington Hotel, it was used for some 10 years, until the licence transferred to the Mornington Hotel in Main St (next to The Grand). It was then renamed Wolfdene and used as a school. William Wilson owned it in the 1870s, when it was described as a “Mansion” on 27 acres of grounds.

Wolfdene

The Argus, 12 December, 1874, p.5