Henry Taber (1860–1936) was an American mathematician.

Taber studied mechanical engineering at Sheffield Scientific School from 1877 to 1882.^[1] Then, he went to Baltimore to study mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, under Charles Sanders Peirce^[2] and William Edward Story. He was awarded a doctorate in 1888, with a dissertation most likely tutored by Story.^[3]

The following year he was assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, but in 1889, on Clark University's foundation hiring his teacher and friend, Story, he went also to Clark.^[4] Both remained at Clark as mathematics professors until retirement in 1921.^[5]

His brother, Robert Taber, was a well known Broadway theatre actor.

Taber popularized linear algebra as expressed with matrices, in particular the symmetric matrix, skew-symmetric matrix, and orthogonal matrix.

The papers by Henry Taber have been listed by Bibliographica Hopkinsiensis^[6]

• 1890: On the Theory of Matrices, American Journal of Mathematics 12: 337 via Hathi Trust
• 1891: "On certain Identities in the Theory of Matrices", American Journal of Mathematics 13
• 1891: "On the application to matrices of any order of the quaternion symbols S and V", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 22
• 1891: "On certain properties of symmetric, skew-symmetric and orthogonal matrices", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 22
• 1891: "On the matrical equation φ Ω = Ω φ", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 18
• 1891: "On a theorem of Sylvester's relating to non-degenerate matrices", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 19
• 1892: "Note on representation of orthogonal matrices", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 19
• 1893: "On real orthogonal substitution", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 20
• 1893: "On the linear transformations between two quadrics", Journal of the London Mathematical Society 24
• 1894: "On orthogonal substitutions that can be expressed as a function of a single alternate (or skew-symmetric) substitution", American Journal of Mathematics 16

• Cooke, Roger; Rickey, V. Frederick (1989). "W. E. Story of Hopkins and Clark". In Peter Duren (ed.). A century of mathematics in America. Part 3. American Mathematical Society. pp. 29–76. ISBN 0-8218-0136-8.
• Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko; Chevalier, Jean Marie (2014). "The Johns Hopkins Metaphysical Club and Its Impact on the Development of the Philosophy and Methodology of Sciences in the Late 19th-Century United States". Commens Working Papers (2): 1–26. ISSN 2342-4532.

• "Faculty Distinctions". Clark University. Retrieved November 25, 2018.
• Henry Taber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project