Fonds CCPP/YOU - Papers of Alfred Young

Alfred Young was born on 16 April, 1873 in Widnes, Lancashire; his family moved to Bournemouth in 1879 and after being educated at home when to Monkton Combe School near Bath. He won a scholarship to Clare College and was admitted in 1892; excellent oarsman; began to undertake research in his third year which prevented him from achieving a very high position in the Tripos and so he was placed tenth Wrangler in 1895; he published his first paper in 1899, "The irreducible concomitants of any number of binary quartics" and in 1900 he introduced "young tableaus" the method for which he is best remembered; appointed as lecturer at Selwyn College in 1901 and Fellow at Clare in 1905 where he also became Bursar; married Edith Clara in 1907; ordained in 1908 and became a Curate at Christ Church, Hastings; also awarded a Sc. D from Cambridge; then parish priest at Birdbrook, Essex where he lived for the rest of his life, combining successfully the work of a parish priest with his researches in the theory of the algebra of groups. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1934; he died on 15 December 1940. See obituary in Clare Association Annual 1947, pp. 99-101