David Wall

David Archibald Wall (1810-1902) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, 1849-1871.

He was born in Wimbledon, in Plough Lane near the junction with Durnsford Road. He was educated at Harrow School, and in 1828 went to Balliol College, Oxford. He received a Double First in Classics and Mathematics in 1831, and was made a Fellow of the College and ordained as a Church of England minister in 1839. He was promoted to Professor in 1849.

In 1841, he married Henrietta Poole, daughter of an army colonel. They had four sons and a daughter; she died in 1889.

In 1871, he decided to retire, and the College gave him a position that was within their gift as Rector of the parish of Huntspill, Somerset, just south of Burnham-on-Sea. He held that position until 1881, when he moved back to Oxford, but he never again held any official position.

Wall and Lewis Carroll

Wall was a contemporary at Oxford of Lewis Carroll. As Carroll was interested in logic, they frequently discussed the subject. He is the W in Carroll's A-Z poem "Examination Statute", "a list of those who might, could, would or should have voted thereon, arranged alphabetically". He did not attend Carroll's funeral, but sent a wreath labelled "a symbol of esteem", possibly referring to Carroll's book "Symbolic Logic".

Wall and James Joseph Sylvester

Another Oxford contemporary was J. J. Sylvester, professor of Geometry 1883-1897. He and Wall were interested in the problem of finding the underlying trend of a series of observations over time. They formulated two principles:

the trend must follow a local cubic polynomial without distortion;
subject to that constraint, the sum of squares of the third differences of the trend must be minimised

These principles were followed by Robert Henderson in his work on trend estimation.

References

Obituary, Oxford Chronicle, 13 November 1902
Lewis Carroll's Diaries, vol. 4, ed. Edward Wakeling (1997), pages 161-2
The Life of Lewis Carroll, Langford Reed (1932)
Henderson, R. (1916). Note on Graduation by Adjusted Average. Transactions of the American Society of Actuaries, 17, 43-48