William Henry Young, 80 years ago

In 1942, 80 years ago now, the English mathematician William Henry Young died in Lausanne, who allowed himself to lead a singular life, combining three successive lives.

Until the age of 35 he devoted himself mainly to the amusements of English university life. He was born in 1863 in London. It was the author of Flatland (which Hardy describes as an “entertaining mathematical fantasy”) who discovered the young William’s mathematical talent at school. This led him to study mathematics at Cambridge. But after his studies he devoted his time to university sports, to the preparation of students for the demanding Cambridge examinations, and to work as an examiner (which was paid for separately), activities which provided him with considerable financial returns. Hardy referred to this period as Young’s “unproductive early years”, commenting that

No one warned him that the best time in a mathematician’s life is between twenty-five and forty.

The second period of his life began when, at the age of thirty, he had Grace Emily Chisholm as a pupil in exam preparation. Grace was the first woman to obtain a doctorate (in any discipline) in Germany, which she did under the guidance of Felix Klein in Göttingen. On her return from Germany, William and Grace married and took two major decisions: to leave England for good, where they disliked the atmosphere, and to devote themselves jointly to mathematical research. In 1897 they left for continental Europe. In 1898 they were in Turin, studying geometry with Corrado Segre, and then went to Göttingen, where they stayed for ten years, followed by seven years in Geneva and the rest in Lausanne.

At the age of 35, Young published his first article in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. From that moment on, he had, for 25 years, a rather intense and extensive scientific activity, publishing three books and more than 200 articles. His best contributions correspond to the theory of integration, the Stieltjes integral and the study of Fourier series. His is the first version of the result known today as the Hausdorff-Young theorem. In 1905 he had independently arrived at a definition of the integral that was equivalent to that of Lebesgue (who had done so shortly before). It was in fact Young who coined the expression “the Lebesgue integral”. Some English colleagues choose to refer to him, in a bitter exercise in humour/resentment, as “the man Lebesgue anticipated”. Hardy considered him one of the most original mathematicians of his generation, but historian Grattan-Guinness considers that he “published more than was good for his career”.

Grace Chisholm shared Young’s passion for mathematical research and in fact there are reasons (explicit in their correspondence) to consider that part of Young’s results were obtained in collaboration with his wife Grace, although only 13 articles are joint and 18 were signed exclusively by her (one of them in Acta Mathematica, the best mathematical journal in the world).

At the age of 60, Young closed his dedication to mathematical research. He held numerous positions in British universities, but all of them were temporary, which for Hardy is a serious reproach for English universities. Despite this, his financial situation was not complicated; after all, Young came from a family with a tradition of banking and financial management. What can be called his retirement coincided with particularly turbulent times in the international organisation of mathematics. We have described this situation when talking about the International Mathematical Union (see the post Someone turns 100 in 2020… Who is it? on this blog). After a series of unforeseen events, Young became president of the International Mathematical Union. It was an unfortunate circumstance as the institution, which had been created and used for political/national manipulation after the First World War, was on the verge of disappearing when Young became president. Despite this, Young placed considerable effort into advertising and attempting to revive an institution that had already been condemned to a well deserved demise by the vast majority of the international mathematical community. In two years Young visited Poland, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Czechoslovakia. He even met the Pope and Mussolini. All of this was paid for out of his own funds and with the aim of keeping alive the society over which he presided. There was no remedy: in 1932 he attended the dissolution of the society, by agreement of the International Congress of Mathematicians meeting in Zurich.

He spent the last years of his life looking after his financial investments and learning foreign languages (for which he was particularly skilled, being fluent in twelve different languages), focusing on Serbo-Croatian.

Learn more

Guillermo P. Curbera, William Henry Young, an Unconventional President of the International Mathematical Union, p.1-29. En: L. Mazliak and R. Tazzioli (eds.), “Mathematical Communities in the Reconstruction After the Great War 1918–1928”, Trends in the History of Science, Birkhäuser, 2021. ISBN: 978-3-030-61682-3-0_1 . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61683-0_1

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