ALFRED YOUNG 1873-1940 H. W. Alfred Young Was Bom at Birchfield

ALFRED YOUNG 1873-1940 H. W. TURNBULL Alfred Young was bom at Birchfield, Farnworth, near Widnes, Lancashire, on 16 April 1873. He died after a short illness on Sunday, 15 December 1940. He was the youngest son of Edward Young, a prosperous Liverpool merchant and a Justice of the Peace for the county. His father married twice and had a large family, eleven living to grow up. The two youngest sons of the two branches of the family rose to scientific distinction: Sydney Young, of the elder family, became a distinguished chemist of Owen's College, Manchester, Uni.ersity College, Bristol, and finally, for many years, of Trinity College, Dublin. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in his thirty-sixth year and died in 193i. Alfred, who was fifteen years his junior, was elected Fellow in 1934, at the age of sixty, in recognition of his mathematical contributions to the algebra of invariants and the theory of groups, a work to which he had devoted over ten years of academic life followed by thirty years of leisure during his duties as rector of a country parish. Recognition of his remarkable powers came late but swiftly; he was admitted to the Fellowship in the year when his name first came up for election. In 1879 the family moved to Bournemouth, and in due course the younger brothers ,vent to school and later to a tutor, under whom Alfred suffered for his brain power, being the only boy considered worth keeping in. Next, he went to Monkton Combe School, near Bath, and there again his unusual mathematical ability was recognised. Thence he gained a scholarship at Clare College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1892. At Clare he formed his life-long friendship with G. H. A. l\'ilson, another distinguished mathematician, who eventually became Master of the College. Young was a good oarsman and rowed in the Junior Trial Eights as a freshman and in the Scratch Fours of 1893. His college friends still remember him as a shy, clever lad with a great humility of spirit which so marked him in his youth and indeed throughout his life. Early in his third year at college his interest in research began, and his enthusiasm doubtless diverted him from the subjects laid down for the Tripos examina- xvi tion, for which he was prepared by the celebrated coach, Webb of St. John's College. In 1895 he graduated as tenth \\'rangler, his friend Wilson being placed fifth. It was a brilliant year; Bromwich was Senior Wrangler, Grace and Whittaker were bracketed second, and thereafter followed Hopkinson, Godfrey, and Maclaurin twelfth Wrangler, to whom one of the three Smith's Prizes was subsequently awarded. Young, who according to Grace was the most original man of his year, would probably have occupied a higher place in the list had he directed his attention to the examination schedule; but in turning to his research, as Wilson tells us, undoubtedly he chose the better path. In the following year Young was placed in the Second Class of the Mathematical Tripos, Part II. From 1901 to 1905 he lectured at Selwyn College, Cambridge, but resigned that appointment shortly after his election to a Fellowship at his own college, where he was also Bursar until 1910. His work received recognition when he was approved for the degree of Sc.D. at Cambridge in 1908. Young had always intended to take Holy Orders, but it was not until 1908 that he was ordained, when he accepted a curacy at Christ Church, Blacklands, Hastings. Two years later he was presented by his College to the living of Birdbrook, a village of Essex about twenty-five miles east of Cambridge and on the borders of Suffolk. There he lived and worked for thirty years, quietly and faithfully performing the duties of a parish priest, beloved by his congregation, who respected and wondered at his great scholastic gifts so modestly set forth. He was ahvays a welcome visitor in their homes, and he conducted the services in the parish church with dignity and sincerity, and was an excellent preacher. He readily undertook the responsibilities of his calling further afield, was appointed in 1923 to be Rural Dean of Belchamp, and in 1929 Chaplain to the Bishop of Colchester. As recently as November 1940 he was installed as Honorary Canon of Chelmsford Cathedral. In 1926 he accepted an invitation from the University of Cambridge to give a course of lectures on Higher Algebra, and this he continued to do for several years during the Lent, and occasionally the May, Term. In 1931 he was awarded the Honorary LL.D. Degree of the University of St. Andrews. In 1907 Alfred Young married Edith Clara, daughter of :Mr. Edward Wilson, of Sheffield, by whom he is survived. There ,vere no children of the marriage. Their home was a typical country rectory, set in an old world garden full of colour and of great charm, where a warm welcome awaited a visitor from Cambridge or elsewhere, young or old, who sought out in this secluded corner of Essex a master of abstract algebra, and found more than a mathematician, a friend. After a thirty-mile bicycle ride (these were the days before the motor bus had become ubiquitous) xvii the shade and peace of the rectory garden on a summer day were greatly refreshing. " He was charming to us ", an undergraduate wrote after such a visit, "and I remember how delighted I was with the Rectory, and how he told us of the excellence of the beer brewed with the water of his pond " . He was a practical mechanic, and had a device by which all the water in the house was pumped up with the help of a little motor engine which was run round to the pump each day. He had also successfully set up a small electric light plant to supply the house. His expert knowledge of its working seemed odd amid those rustic surroundings, till one recalled his interests in the more practical mathematics besides the theory of groups, and the paper he had published on the electromagnetic properties of coils. He was very methodical in planning his duties and his leisure ; he was a willing correspondent and would take great pains to answer the mathematical queries of his friends, sharing ,vith them liberally his mvn abundant thoughts on algebra, invariants and geometry. He could take up or lay aside and again, after sewral weeks, resume a formidable piece of algebraic eomputation, without apparently losing the threads of the arguments and with the utmost composure. Every year he and his wife would regularly take their holiday shortly after Easter at a South Coast resort. and every Tuesday they would go over to Cambridge and thus keep in touch with their eniversity friends, a practice which doubtless started when Young returned to the lecture room at the call of the University. His quiet determination and his unhurried devotion to the things of the mind and of the spirit were very impressive. Of such might Whittier have been thinking when he wrote: "And let our ordered lives confess, The beauty of Thy peace " . Y onng was intellectually alert to the end of his life, and during his last year he was constantly working at his ninth memoir, to which he attached great importance. It was nearly finished and lay on his desk awaiting the final touches. During the last few days of illness he asked his doctor whether he could hope to live to finish his work. l\ly friend W. L. Edge has supplied a picture of the lecture course when Young resumed his teaching at Cambridge : "I remember (who could forget?) very well my experiences of attending his first lectures. This was only a course of one lecture a week for one term ; you can see for yourself how much he got through . .. Doubtless it is all standard work to you, but it will be interesting to see how the old warrior entered the lists again and what he considered should be given to his first hearers. I went along on 19 January 1926, in my third year, just two terms before my Tripos, to Clare . there were eleven of us and I was the only undergraduate who ventured. Others in the class were, I think, Cooper, now xviii at Belfast; Broadbent, now at Greenwich; L. H. Thomas, who got a Smith's Prize and a Trinity Fellowship and went to America; Dirac certainly, and F. P. White, the only 1\1.A. And I remember the tall clerical figure entering the room, and his surprise at so large an audience, and shaking hands with White with obvious pleasure. And so to linear transformations and Aronhold's symbolic notation .... At the end of his last lcctme in )larch, Young said that he was so pleased that people had turned up that he would lecture again in the following term. And he and I were both surprised, and I very embarrassed. when no other member of the cl,\ss but myself showed up in April. It was my Tripos term, but I was not going to miss his lectures ! . One lecture fell during the General Strike, and no preparation of room, blackboard, chalk or anything had been made by the college. So Young sat down beside me and wrote out the notes with his own hand ''. Young had a quiet humour. "I remember an occasion", \\Tites \Yilson, ·' when he said to me with a grave face: I have lost all sense of personal security'.

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