Department of Mathematics and Statistics

A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton


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7.   Grind of work; birth of Margaret; intimations of breakdown; DSc; FRSE

It is remarkable that during this period Aitken, from his own reading and more or less from scratch, became familiar with the most recent developments in matrix algebra, numerical analysis and statistics, the basis of all his subsequent work.

Aitken’s development as a mathematician came about largely through his own efforts. As a young man he was not, in the traditional manner, initiated into research by an experienced supervisor, but instead derived his inspiration from the works of the great masters of the past. […] Those who shared with him the joys of amateur music-making will recognize the kinship between his mathematical and musical activities. Both displayed a refreshing spontaneity and directness, unfettered by ponderous professionalism, but executed with an individual technique that had been evolved by genuine insight and personal involvement.49

That said, his research was not going well. Whatever Whittaker had originally proposed for the topic of Aitken’s thesis, in January 1925,50 in what must have seemed to Aitken a step into nightmare, Whittaker changed it to graduation (that is, smoothing) of data, taking as a focus a problem suggested by the work of G.J. Lidstone, the well-known actuary. This problem was no pushover. Whittaker had made no real progress with it, and while it suggests an unusual degree of confidence in Aitken that it was handed to him at so late a stage (his scholarship, of two years duration, had less than nine months to run), his anxiety can be easily imagined. The following months were nearly desperate.

I took the “Archimedes” multiplying machine home to Westfield (discovering in the process that our home was some 1100 yards from Barnton Station), and performed very heavy calculations, in order to come at linear combinations for graduating crude data. These were indeed appalling calculations.51

There is a comical side to his registering the distance from the station to his house, but computations Aitken described as appalling must have been so. He worked up to fourteen hours a day. Signs of distress appeared almost at once. One wonders what crack opened, what was revealed in the walk he took with Winifred on 10 January, ‘gradually accomplished […] perhaps a rash undertaking, but all was well’. On 17 March he fell ill with symptoms he likened to food poisoning. ‘I was ill for weeks, living on orange juice only, seriously shaken by illness for the first time’. He had arranged to mark exams as a money spinner and did so from his bed, badly in his own estimation, which added to his misery. The calculations, thus temporarily suspended, were not resumed until April.

Winifred gave birth to their first child Margaret on 10 April, and spent a month with the baby recuperating at a nursing home. Aitken worked at home and slept badly, his solitary night hours punctuated by the hooting of an owl. ‘One evening in mid-April stands out,’ he wrote,

I saw [the Pentland Hills] in a strange light of late sunset (such as is never seen in New Zealand); and I recall, as a signpost or turning point in life, the new but ominous beauty, the faintness of convalescence through which it was seen – and from which it took perhaps some of its dark colour.52

This recalls two passages from Gallipoli to the Somme, in which effects of light are interpreted in similarly portentous terms.

On the return journey an evening of violet light turning to grey worked more and more on my solitary mood. Mentem mortalia tangunt;53 the ubiquity of death; curtains of mortality hanging about the world;

and, in ‘Dantesque surroundings’, when

prolonged loss of sleep and unremitting qui vive had made the skyline acquire a fiery edge and tree-trunks had begun to shimmer in a subjective heliotrope mirage.54

During April Aitken found the key to solving his problem and the thesis was quickly wound up. It was a staggering achievement. According to the title page the thesis was submitted for a DSc in May 1925 and the degree conferred on 22 July. On 4 June Aitken wrote to his brother Les in Dunedin:

Now I am telling you something which must be kept out of the papers until it reaches N.Z. by normal paths. The Ph.D. is a poor degree in comparison with the D.Sc.; any M.A. who chooses to do two years of research can botch up a Ph.D. thesis, but five years work after M.A. and a solid contribution to scientific knowledge are requisite for a D.Sc. Moreover the D.Sc. of N.Z. is fairly good, though not considered highly here, but the D.Sc. of Edinburgh is a valuable degree. Well, late in February55 Prof. Whittaker gave me a subject for a Ph.D. thesis. He thought I could work up enough on it in several weeks. It was to take a piece of the mathematical theory of statistics which he had himself done, and reduce it to a form workable in practice. When I looked into it I saw that it had far wider possibilities than he imagined. I extended the theory, threw a lot of his work overboard, substituting stuff of my own, compiled tables for use in practice which took weeks of calculation, working 9 a.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. and typed out a large thesis. Leaving out the weeks of illness, this took me ten weeks. When I submitted it for his approval before sending it in for Ph.D., he was so impressed that he advised me to send it in for D.Sc., and found a clause under which I was eligible, 5 years having elapsed since my M.A. in 1919.56

He went on to complain that his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (on 9 March 1925), an honour of which he made nothing, had been leaked to the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin.57

The somewhat breathless tone of the letter may be a trailing consequence of the strain of the preceding months. By contrast, a letter to Pearl that covers similar ground is almost dreamy.

It is a long time since I wrote to you, and much has happened in the interim. I have been busy since the middle of February from daylight till dark on a thesis, recently submitted for degree, and I am now awaiting the result.

In March my work was interrupted by a bad illness, from which I have only recovered now. It was of the nature of typhoid or something like that, though the doctor could not attach a definite label to it. It is now merely an unpleasant memory. When I recovered I had to work all the harder to get the thesis done, and the calculating machine I had at home with me must have received some hundreds of thousands of turns.58

He passes to news of the new baby, his thoughts about returning to New Zealand (‘Professor Whittaker is desirous of keeping me here to do research with him for a little while longer’), Pearl’s plans and Harry’s progress, and concludes:

There is not much news just now. These are quiet halcyon days.
 “Birds of calm
 Sit brooding on the charmèd wave”,
and I am resting on my oars after a long and sustained effort.

These months of concentrated thought and sustained anxiety left their mark. Margaret pointed out that the youthful confidence one sees in early photographs of Aitken vanished after 1927. Aitken recalled much later,

I worked too hard, and against time, worry and illness, over my thesis; and incurred in 1927 a severe breakdown which permanently altered my outlook on life. The thesis had got me, not a Ph.D. but to my very great surprise a D.Sc., and a post on the Edinburgh staff in 1925, but at a cost. It was 1932 or 1933 before I recovered zest and will power; but in fact it was never the same.59


49  W. Lederman, Obituary, Ed. Math. Soc., 162, 163.
50  According to the Memoir (p. 81); mid- or late-February according to contemporary letters.
51  Memoir, 81.
52  Memoir, 82.
53  ‘The burdens of mortality touch the heart’.
54  Pages 120, 143.
55  See footnote 44.
56  ACA to Les, 4 June 1925.
57  The item appeared on 2 April.
58  14 June 1925.
59  ACA to Kania, 23 May 1956.
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