Abstract
In 1911 William Henry Young, fellow of Peterhouse College Cambridge, part-time mathematics coach and schools’ examiner, applied for the chair of Pure Mathematics at Edinburgh University. His credentials were impressive. As well as experience in education, Young was a research mathematician with three books and ninety-two original papers to his credit, a DSc from Cambridge and expertise in a new field of analysis that was having a profound impact on the development of mathematics on the Continent. Winning the Chair at Edinburgh was important to Young. During the last eight years he had failed to obtain chairs at Kings College London, Liverpool, Durham and Cambridge Universities and, having embarked on research mathematics at the relatively old age of thirty-six (he was now approaching fifty) he was anxious that he should find a suitable post before he got much older. An examiner colleague of Young’s, mathematician George M. Minchin of London University, wrote a testimonial emphasising his friend’s exceptional reputation and extensive published work. In a private letter to Young he added:
Perhaps I ought to have said that I was recommending the Firm of W.H. Young & Co. — for I by no means overlook the well-known name of the partner, CGY (Grace Chisholm Young) so well known to mathematicians.1
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Notes
I. Grattan-Guinness, ‘A mathematical union: William Henry and Grace Chisholm Young’, Annals of Science, 29 (2) (1972), 105–186 (pp. 140–141).
For example see Graham Sutton, ‘The centenary of the birth of W.H. Young’, Mathematical Gazette, 59 (1963), 17–21.
Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 76.
Fernanda Perrone, ‘Women academics in England, 1870–1930’, History of Universities, 12 (1) (1993), 339–367 (p. 339).
Helena Swanwick, ‘Memoir of Girton, 1882–1885’, in Strong-Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth-century England, ed. by Janet Murray (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 239–242 (p. 240).
Barbara Caine, Destined to be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 141.
Lidia Sciama, ‘Ambivalence and dedication: Academic wives in Cambridge University, 1870–1970’, in The Incorporated Wife, ed. by Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 50–66 (p. 53).
Brian Clegg, Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable (London: Robinson, 2003), p. 157. This provides an accessible history of set theory and the concept of infinity.
Russell’s paradox is the most famous of the logical or set-theoretical paradoxes. The paradox arises within naive set theory by considering the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set appears to be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself, hence the paradox: A.D. Irvine, ‘Russell’s Paradox’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/russell-paradox/> [accessed February 12 2005].
Ibid., D140/30/1 (Young to Grace, February 1904): W.H. Young, ‘On upper and lower integration’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2 (1904–5), 52–66.
For example: Margaret W. Rossiter, ‘The Matthew/Matilda effect in science’, Social Studies of Science, 23 (1993), 325–341; Sime, pp. 326–329, documents how Lise Meitner was overlooked for a Nobel Prize for her contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission; the prize went to her male partner Otto Hahn despite Meitner being the lead investigator.
Robin J. Wilson, ‘Hardy and Littlewood’, in Cambridge Scientific Minds, ed. by Peter Harmant and Simon Mitton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 202–219 (p. 202).
John J. O’Connor and Edmund F. Robertson, ‘G.H. Hardy’, in The Mac-Tutor History of Mathematics Archive <http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/index.html> [accessed February 5 2005].
Patricia Rothman recounts an amusing anecdote (received from a friend of the Youngs, A.S. Besicovitch) which illustrates Young’s insecurity: ‘William Henry Young was out swimming one day with Besicovitch and he got into difficulties. Besicovitch swam over to help him. With Besicovitch’s assistance, W.H. Young came up for a “third time” coughing, his long beard bobbing in the waves, he spluttered out as he gasped for breath “Are you one of those people who think my wife is a better mathematician than I am?”’, Patricia Rothman, ‘Grace Chisholm Young and the division of the laurels’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50 (1) (1996), 89–100 (p. 97).
LUSA, Young Papers, D140/30/5.1 (G.H. Hardy, ‘W.H. Young’, Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 17 (1942), 218–237 (p. 220).
Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 172.
Deirdre David, ‘“Art’s a service”: Social wound, sexual politics and Aurora Leigh’, in Victorian Woman Poets: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 108–131 (p. 129).
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© 2009 Claire G. Jones
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Jones, C.G. (2009). Collaboration, Reputation and the Business of Mathematics. In: Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246652_5
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