Arthur Stewart Eve, who will be remembered mainly for his pioneer work on radioactivity and his lovable character, was born at Silsoe, Bedfordshire, on 22 November 1862, son of John Richard and Frederica (Somers) Eve and, after an active and varied life spent for the most part in Canada, passed away in retirement at Puttenham, Surrey, on 24 March 1948, in his eighty-sixth year. Scholar, teacher, pioneer with Rutherford, soldier and scientific director in the first World War, Eve later was appointed Head of the Department of Physics in McGill University, Montreal, and Dean of the Graduate Faculty. The fine, well-balanced qualities of the man are well presented in the following quotations from an editorial, ‘In a Great McGill Tradition’, which appeared in the Montreal Gazette at the time of his death : ‘In the best sense, he was a university character. He was provocative but not contentious, kindly but not sentimental, critical but not cruel, humorous but not foolish, shrewd but not harsh. As he moved about the campus walks in his last years at McGill, he was a man whose life had been deepened by the vigorous use of the mind on illimitable problems, and mellowed by zest and common sense which had kept his outlook keen and reasonable.’ ‘Dean Eve’s discoveries in radioactivity and in geophysics received their due and full recognition from the highest learned societies of the world, including the Royal Society of London, on whose Council Dr Eve served in his later years. They were the recognition of the fruits of his “voyaging through strange seas of thought”. ‘But these far voyagings, valuable as they were in their discoveries, never took Dr Eve away from the warmth and colour of ordinary human experience. In the soundness of his humanity he looked for his satisfaction: ‘ “Not in Utopia—subterranean fields,— Of some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where, in the end We find our happiness, or not at all.” ’
Fatima Al-Fihri Founder of the First World University