Alfred Young

Alfred Young ( born May 16, 1873 in Widnes, Lancashire, † December 15, 1940 in Bird Brook in Essex ) was an English mathematician and priest, who is best known for his invention of the Young- Tableaux in the representation theory of groups.

Life and work

Young was the first son of the second marriage of a wealthy Liverpool merchant and justice of the peace. 1879 the family moved to Bournemouth, where he was initially taught privately and later at a school in Bath. On the advice of his teachers, who discovered his mathematical talent, he took part in the entrance exams for Cambridge and won a scholarship to Clare College, which he entered in 1892. He distinguished himself in the rowing team and began to investigate mathematically (so that it only has 10 in the Cambridge Tripos very important tests that required intensive preparation). His first work appeared in 1899 and were invariant theory and other branches of the algebraic geometry of the 19th century dedicated. After a lectureship in 1901 on Selwich college, he was a Fellow at Clare College in 1905. In 1907 he married but had no children life. In 1908 he took holy orders and was curator at Christchurch in Hastings and, from 1910, a pastor in East Brook near Cambridge. In addition, he held from 1926 again lectures in Cambridge ( where he heard such as Paul Dirac ), which had awarded him in 1908 for his mathematical work the doctor. In 1934 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Young is best known for his invention of the Young tableaux (1900), which arose from his work on invariant theory. With these tableaux can be the irreducible representations of the symmetric group S (N) and thus, for example, the unitary groups U ( N) and the SU (N), characterized. The significance of these tableaux was early on recognized by the then leading English group theorist William Burnside and Hermann Weyl and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, who used it in 1903. The work of Frobenius and Isay Schur for Representation theory were young not yet known initially ( until Burnside pointed out to him ), but he suggested in his later works (his long series of articles on quantitative substitutional analysis, the last posthumously appeared in 1952 ) from the 1920 connections to the German school of representation theory.

In addition to his mathematics, he also worked as an inventor; he patented in 1918 an electric motor for pumps and 1919 a generator for high frequencies.