1. Karen Hunger Parshall and David E. Rowe: The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community 1876–1900: James Joseph Sylvester, Felix Klein, and Eliakim Hastings Moore. Providence: American Mathematical Society (forthcoming).
2. The Edinburgh University Calendar 1900–1901. Edinburgh: James Thin, 1900, p. 90.
3. A. Logan Turner: History of the University of Edinburgh 1883–1933. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1933, pp. 210–211.
4. Many of the biographical details which follow may be found in the following limited accounts: H. S. Taylor: Joseph Henry Maclagen [sic] Wedderburn, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society: 1948–1949, vol. 6, pp. 619–625; H. W. Turnbull: Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S., Year Book of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1948 and 1949, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1950, 51-52; and Dictionary of Scientific Biography, V. “Wedderburn, Joseph Henry Maclagan„, by Henry Nathan. According to officials at the bank which settled Wedderburn’s estate (the Bank of Princeton), the papers remaining at his death were subsequently destroyed, thereby limiting historical study of Wedderburn’s life and work almost exclusively to published sources. Because of the superficiality and unreliabilty of much of this published information, I attempt here both to correct published factual errors and to integrate Wedderburn’s work into the description of his troubled life through an examination of new archival and published sources. For a detailed genealogy of the Wedderburn family, see Alexander Wedderburn: The Wedderburn Book: A History of the Wedderburns in the Counties of Berwick and Forfar, Designed of Wedderburn, Kingennie, Easter, Powrie, Blackness, Balindean, and Gosford; And Their Younger Branches; Together With Some Account of Other Families of the Name 1296–1896, 2 vols., Printed for Private Circulation, 1898.
5. Alexander J. Warden: Angus or Forfarshire: The Land and People, Descriptive and Historical, 5 vols. Dundee: Charles Alexander & Co., 1884, 4:43.