Alfred Young was born at Birchfield, Farnworth, near Widnes, Lancashire, on 16 April 1873. He died after a short illness on Sunday, 15 December 1940. He was the youngest son of Edward Young, a prosperous Liverpool merchant and a Justice of the Peace for the county. His father married twice and had a large family, eleven living to grow up. The two youngest sons of the two branches of the family rose to scientific distinction: Sydney Young, of the elder family, became the distinguished chemist of Owen’s College, Manchester, University College, Bristol, and finally, for many years, of Trinity College, Dublin. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in his thirty-sixth year and died in 1937. Alfred, who was fifteen years his junior, was elected Fellow in 1934, at the age of sixty, in recognition of his mathematical contributions to the algebra of invariants and the theory of groups, a work to which he had devoted over ten years of academic life followed by thirty years of leisure during his duties as Rector of a country parish. Recognition of his remarkable powers came late but swiftly: he was admitted to the Fellowship in the year when his name first came up for election. In 1879 the family moved to Bournemouth, and in due course the younger brothers went to school and later to a tutor, under whom Alfred suffered for his brain power, being the only boy considered worth keeping in.
Alfred Young, 1873 - 1940
