William Henry Young FRS ( London, 20 October 1863 – Lausanne, 7 July 1942) was an English mathematician. Young was educated at City of London School and

Peterhouse, Cambridge Peterhouse is the oldest constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England, founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely. Today, Peterhouse has 254 undergraduates, 116 full-time graduate students and 54 fellows. It is quite ...

. He worked on

measure theory In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures ( length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as mass and probability of events. These seemingly distinct concepts have many simil ...

Fourier series A Fourier series () is a summation of harmonically related sinusoidal functions, also known as components or harmonics. The result of the summation is a periodic function whose functional form is determined by the choices of cycle length (or ''p ...

differential calculus In mathematics, differential calculus is a subfield of calculus that studies the rates at which quantities change. It is one of the two traditional divisions of calculus, the other being integral calculus—the study of the area beneath a curve. ...

, amongst other fields, and made contributions to the study of functions of several

complex variable Complex analysis, traditionally known as the theory of functions of a complex variable, is the branch of mathematical analysis that investigates functions of complex numbers. It is helpful in many branches of mathematics, including algebraic ...

s. He was the husband of

Grace Chisholm Young Grace Chisholm Young (née Chisholm, 15 March 1868 – 29 March 1944) was an English mathematician. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, England and continued her studies at Göttingen University in Germany, where in 1895 she receive ...

, with whom he authored and co-authored 214 papers and 4 books. Two of their children became professional mathematicians (

Laurence Chisholm Young Laurence Chisholm Young (14 July 1905 – 24 December 2000) was a British mathematician known for his contributions to measure theory, the calculus of variations, optimal control theory, and potential theory. He was the son of William Henry You ...

, Cecilia Rosalind Tanner). Young's Theorem was named after him. In 1913 he was the first to be appointed to the newly created chair of Hardinge Professorship of Pure Mathematics in Calcutta University which he held from 1913 to 1917. He also held the part-time Professorship of Philosophy and the History of Mathematics at the University of Liverpool from 1913 to 1919. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 2 May 1907. He served as the president of the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

from 1922 to 1924. In 1917 he was awarded the De Morgan Medal of

and in 1928 the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society. He served as the president of the International Mathematical Union from 1929 to 1936.

Works

* * * William Henry Young & Grace Chisholm Young (1906
The Theory of Sets of Points
link from Internet Archive.

References

External links

University of Liverpool: Papers of Professor William Henry Young and Grace Chisholm Young
19th-century British mathematicians 20th-century British mathematicians Alumni of Peterhouse, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society 1863 births 1942 deaths De Morgan Medallists University of Calcutta faculty {{UK-mathematician-stub