Alfred Young

Alfred Young (born May 16, 1873 in Widnes in Lancashire , † December 15, 1940 in Birdbrook in Essex ) was an English mathematician and pastor, who is best known for his invention of the Young Tableaux in the representation theory of groups.

life and work

Young was the first son of a wealthy Liverpool merchant and justice of the peace. In 1879 the family moved to Bournemouth , where he was first taught privately and later in a school near Bath . On the advice of his teachers, who discovered his mathematical talent, he took the entrance exams for Cambridge and won a scholarship to Clare College, which he entered in 1892. He excelled in the rowing team, began to study and took tenth place in the Tripos tests, which were very important in Cambridge and which required intensive preparation. His first work appeared in 1899 and was devoted to invariant theory and other branches of algebraic geometry of the 19th century.

In 1901 he began teaching at Selwich College and was made a fellow at Clare College in 1905.

He married in 1907 but had no children in his life.

In 1908 he became a curator at Christ Church in Hastings . In the same year he was awarded a doctorate in Cambridge for his mathematical work.

In 1910 he was ordained a pastor in Eastbrook near Cambridge. From 1926 he also gave lectures in Cambridge, where he a. a. Paul Dirac heard.

In 1934 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society .

Young is best known for his invention of the Young Tableaux (1900), which emerged from his work on the invariant theory. With these tableaux, the irreducible representations of the symmetrical group S (N) and thus also z. B. characterize the unitary groups U (N) and SU (N). The importance of these tableaux was recognized early on by the then leading English group theorist William Burnside as well as by Hermann Weyl and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius , who used them as early as 1903. The work of Frobenius and Issai Schur on representation theory was initially unknown to Young (Burnside first drew his attention to it), but he turned it down in his later work (his long series of articles On quantitative substitutional analysis , the last of which appeared posthumously in 1952) 1920s connections to the German school of representation theory.

In addition to his work as a mathematician and pastor, he was also active as an inventor; In 1918 he patented an electric motor for pumps and in 1919 a generator for high frequencies.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Alfred Young. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .