Abstract
Albert Edward Ingham was born at Northampton on 3 April 1900 and educated at Northampton and King Edward Vi’s Grammar School, Stafford. His father, also Albert Edward, was a boot-machine operator and designed the ‘veldtschoen’, for which his firm awarded him a very modest honorarium. (The son wore boots until he was sixty.) There was an elder brother, Christopher, in the family and three younger sisters. It is recorded that, aged three, the boy showed his aptitude for numbers and angles by learning to tell the time. He had an ear for music but had no training. Christopher had piano lessons, but when his mother, hearing the piano played in the next room, assumed that he was doing his musical homework, she found that it was A.E. who was teaching himself. He won every prize that a brilliant schoolboy could win and an open scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in December 1917, going into residence in January 1919 after a few months in the army. As an undergraduate he was handsome, with black hair and deep blue eyes, slow-moving, seldom speaking unless spoken to, friendly if sparing of smiles. He gave an impression of rock-like strength and integrity. He gained the highest honours in the Mathematical Tripos, a Smith’s Prize and an 1851 Senior Exhibition. In 1922, at his first attempt, he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity for a dissertation in which, according to him, he proved two lemmas. A friend who brought him news of his election recalls that Ingham said ‘Oh’ and went on working, perhaps at a third lemma.