William Henry Young, 1863 - 1942

Abstract

William Henry Young, who died at Lausanne on 7 July 1942, at the age of seventy-eight, was one of the most profound and original of the English mathematicians of the last fifty years. Young was born in London on 20 October 1863. His ancestors were Ipswich people, but had been bankers in the City for some generations. His early education was at the City of London School; the headmaster, Edwin A. Abbott, had been a schoolfellow of his father. Abbott was the author of the entertaining mathematical fantasy Flatland, and was enough of a mathematician to recognize Young’s exceptional talents, which seem indeed to have been understood much better at school than at home. He came up to Cambridge, as a scholar of Peterhouse, in 1881. He came with a reputation to sustain and, if we are to judge him as an undergraduate and by the standards of the time, he hardly lived up to it. He was expected to be senior wrangler, but was fourth, Sheppard, Workman and Bragg being above him; and he did not send in an essay for a Smith’s prize (though the new regulations, which should have suited him exactly, had just come into force). It is easy now to see reasons for Young’s comparative failure. The whole system of mathematical education in Cambridge was deplorable. The college teaching was negligible, the professors were inaccessible, and an undergraduate’s only chance of learning some mathematics was from a private coach. Young, like nearly all the best mathematicians of his time, coached with Routh, from whom he could learn a lot. But he had many other interests, and no doubt he wasted much of his time. He was a good, though unsystematic, chess player, and an enthusiastic swimmer and rower; and his greatest disappointment as an undergraduate seems to have been his failure to get a place in the college boat. He had always immense physical as well as mental energy, and remained an ardent oarsman all his life.