From the Oxford English Dictionary
According to the mathematician T. S. Davies (
Notes & Queries, 1850), the term originated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, earlier at Great Marlow, in the early 19th century and was coined by students in the class of William Wallace, instructor in mathematics at this institution from 1803 to 1819: ‘Wallace..had a bald head, and an exceedingly ‘broad Scotch’ accent... It happened on one hot summer's day..that he had been teaching a class, and had worked himself into a considerable effusion from the skin. He took out his handkerchief, rubbed his head and forehead violently, and exclaimed in his Perthshire dialect, — "It maks one swot." This was a God-send to the ‘gentlemen cadets’, wishing to achieve a notoriety as wits and slangsters; and mathematics generally ever after became swot, and mathematicians swots. I have often heard it said:— "I never could do swot well, Sir"; and "these dull fellows, the swots, can talk of nothing but triangles and equations".’
William Wallace (1768–1843), was in fact from Fife, although he had previously taught at Perth Academy from 1794 to 1803; he went on to become professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X-Y Z
