| Department of Mathematics and Statistics |
A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton
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15. Reputation
‘The years 1930 and onwards began to fall into a routine,’ he wrote. ‘The evening suburban train, Waverley to Corstorphine, the arrival home exactly at 7 p.m., the children just put to bed, supper and quiet study.’
He would be deeply absorbed in his work. Sometimes George and I would go in and play with things on his desk, and he’d be sitting, working. But other times he was too deeply absorbed and he just wanted to be alone. We understood this and he would say ‘Gowter’, and this meant ‘Get out of here’. It was the code word.123
Other family stories develop the theme of unworldliness. Those that follow were told to me one after another by John Mott, Margaret’s husband. They would, he said with implied admonishment, if multiplied, convey more truly what Aitken was than any structured biography.
Aitken visited a bootmaker and somehow came away with a pair of shoes. They had been repaired but were not his. When he got home Winifred asked had he bought them and he replied ‘I don’t know.’
To relieve the strain on Alec’s eyes when he was working, Winifred bought him a reading lamp for his desk. One evening she found him with the lamp directed into his eyes and the book in the half-light.
A friend, well-to-do and well-dressed, commented that Aitken’s clothes looked as though they’d been cut out with a knife and fork.
Alec went shopping for a hat and came back with one that didn’t fit. On another occasion he bought a watch with a brass face that, when he got it home, didn’t work. Winifred suggested he take it back but Alec said the man was so rough he would probably deny all knowledge of it.
Around New Year’s Day 1930 Aitken wrote:
There is nothing intrinsically significant in the decimal scale of notation, but to begin a new decade is to turn one’s back partially on the past. I wished to rebuild the temporarily weakened will and to widen my mathematical range.124
Despite the breakdown of 1929, he had been rebuilding for some time. He read a paper to the Edinburgh Mathematical Society on 3 May 1929 and ‘during the discussion which followed, Prof. Whittaker congratulated Dr. Aitken on the brilliance of his work’. On 1 November 1929 he was elected Vice-President of the Society, having previously been a member of the Committee and editor of the Society’s Mathematical Notes. A correspondence was underway with Herbert Turnbull of St Andrews, which was to lead to their jointly-authored volume Canonical Matrices (1932). He lectured to the advanced statistics class, the actuarial class in the evening, and occasionally to the intermediate honours students. In the summer of 1930 he gave a series of lectures on ‘Developments in symmetric functions, determinants and algebraic equations’ at the St Andrews Colloquium.
I gave three lectures, but they seem now unimportant. What I chiefly remember is the early mornings, the long corridors in University Hall, the dove-blue or dove-grey clouds in the north, over the Tay; the blaze of summer, the view of St Andrews from the Ladebraes Walk, or from the hill.125
Whoever left the crush of ego on ego at a conference for the relief of the open air will love Aitken for this remark.
| 123 | MM to me, 22 May 1995. |
| 124 | Memoir, 97. |
| 125 | Memoir, 98. |
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