He was the son of naturalist Robert Ball[2] and Amelia Gresley Hellicar. He was born in Dublin.[3] and was educated at Trinity College Dublin where he won a scholarship in 1859 and was a senior moderator in both mathematics and experimental and natural science in 1861.
Ball worked for Lord Rosse from 1865 to 1867. In 1867, he became Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin. There he lectured on mechanics and published an elementary account of the science.[4]
When Ball and the screw theorists speak of screws they no longer mean actual cylindrical objects with helical threads cut into them but the possible motion of any body whatsoever, including that of the screw independently of the nut.[6]
Ball's treatise The Theory of Screws (1876) is now in the public domain.[7]
In 1882, Popular Science Monthly carried his article "A Glimpse through the Corridors of Time".[9] The following year it carried his two-part article on "The Boundaries of Astronomy".[10] He was knighted in 1886.[citation needed]
Ball expounded the tides in Time and Tide: a Romance of the Moon (1889).[11] He published in 1891 The Cause of an Ice Age[12][13] and in 1892 An Atlas of Astronomy.[14][15]
In 1900, Cambridge University Press published A Treatise on the Theory of Screws.[17] It followed works meant for a more general audience, such as The Story of the Heavens,[18] first published in 1886. Much in the limelight, he stood as President of the Quaternion Society. He was also President of the Mathematical Association in 1900.[19]
Their children were: Frances Amelia, Robert Steele, William Valentine (later Sir), Mary Agnetta, Charles Rowan Hamilton, and Randall Gresley (later Colonel). Reminiscences and Letters of Sir Robert Ball by his son W.V. Ball was published in 1915 by Cassell & Company.[23]
Ball became celebrated for his popular lectures on science. He gave an estimated 2500 lectures between 1875 and 1910 in towns and cities across Britain and Ireland.[25][26]
In 1881, 1887, 1892, 1898 and 1900 he was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, Astronomy; Astronomy and Great Chapters from the Book of Nature. During the Lent term of 1900, he gave a lecture entitled The Eternal Stars to the Junior School section of Monkton Combe School in Combe Down, which was reported in the school magazine, The Magpie, 2 March 1900.[27]
^The title The Story of the Heavens appears in a list of 22 books found on pages 660 to 662 of the 1st edition of Ulysses.Joyce, James (1922). Ulysses (1st ed.). Paris: Shakespeare and Company. p. 661.