His father undertook his early education which centred mainly round the Classics. He began Latin and Greek before he was six. His own memories of this time were of regular Latin essays on Roman History and of walks with his father in which Latin was the only permitted language of conversation. His ambition was to be a sailor. He was always drawing pictures of boats at sea, and some good models of ships he made at this time are still in existence.

I had then just taken my degree, and K.P. had taken me upon his staff as Demonstrator, at what then seemed to me the princely salary of £40 a year. Nowadays young people expect at least £250 a year in the same circumstances, but then they do not get the stimulus of a Karl Pearson, which was worth more to me than the difference. K.P. lectured to us on the 'Mathematical Theory of Statistics', and on one occasion wrote down a certain integral as zero, which it should have been on an accepted general principal. Unfortunately I have always been one of those wrong-headed persons who refuse to accept the statements of Professors, unless I can verify them for myself. After much labour, I actually arrived at the value of the integral directly - and it was nothing like zero. I took this result to K.P., and then, if I may say so, the fun began. The battle lasted, I think, about a week, but in the end I succeeded in convincing Professor Pearson. It was typical of K.P. that, the moment he was really convinced, he saw the full consequences of the result, proceeded at once to build up a new theory (which involved scrapping some previously published results) and generously associated me with himself in the resulting paper. I often wonder now, with my much enlarged experience of the Professorial class, how many Professors would have taken an error pointed out by a student in quite that spirit. I hope all of them would have done, but I wonder.

Whereas Louis Napoleon George Filon an Alien, now residing at Godwin House, St Augustine's Avenue, Croydon, Surrey has presented to me, the Right Honourable Sir Matthew White Ridley, Bart, one of Her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State, a Memorial, praying for a Certificate of Naturalisation, and alleging that he is a subject of France, having been born at Saint Cloud; and is the son of Augustin and Madeline Filon, both subjects of France, of the age of Twenty-Two years, is a Teacher of Mathematics and is unmarried.

Filon was too clever an algebraist to be a pure geometer in the stricter sense, but he had a real feeling for pure geometry and it was one of his chief interests. He was perhaps a little ashamed of this, for he realised that it was difficult to reconcile with his somewhat utilitarian attitude towards mathematics, and he took a special delight in producing examples, sometimes a little strained, of the application of projective geometry to problems of physics or astronomy.

A series of interesting experiments were carried out during 1918, in the Engineering Laboratory at University College, under the auspices of the Air Ministry. The experiments were carried out by Mr Chakko and Air-Cadet McGowan, under the general supervision of Major A R Low, R.A.F., and Major L N G Filon, R.A.F. An account of these experiments has been given by Major A R Low in the 'Aeronautical Journal' for November 1918. The object of the investigation was to test a theory, due to Mr Harris Booth and Mr Harold Bolas, and further developed by Mr Arthur Berry, for calculating the stresses in the frameworks carrying aeroplane wings. This theory, of which an account is being published in the 'Transactions of the Royal Aeronautical Society', contains an extension of Clapeyron's well-known theorem of 'Three Moments', so as to include the effects of bending moment due to end-thrust. The fundamental assumption made in this theory is that the nodes of the framework, originally collinear and horizontal, remain collinear and horizontal when the load is applied, so that we can treat them, for mathematical purposes, as fixed points. The second half of the assumption - namely, that the nodes remain horizontal - is not essential, for we can, without sensible error to the order of approximation considered, measure deflections from the line of nodes. But the first assumption - namely, that the nodes remain collinear - is of primary importance.

In all that had to do with University administration he showed the characteristic which, perhaps more than any other, distinguished his whole life thoroughness. Needless to say, his unswerving devotion to what he considered right, and his lack of that praiseworthy pliancy and useful obliquity which adorn some of our leading administrators, occasionally led him to oppose certain notable personalities, but, in spite of this, his services were so outstanding that he was elected vice-chancellor of the University in 1933-35, the period during which the foundation stone of the candid and considerable -may we say elephantine - University building was laid.

It is a commonplace of Biological Science that each individual, in his physical development, reproduces in an abridged form the successive stages through which the race has passed in its remote history. Educational experience suggests that a similar process occurs in mental development, so that, generally speaking, ideas have to be introduced in the order of their historical occurrence, if unnecessary resistance is not to be encountered. A study of the early history of any branch of knowledge is therefore, apart from its interest to the curious, of practical importance to those concerned in teaching it. It is this consideration which has led me to select, as the subject of my remarks this afternoon, the primitive stages in the history of Arithmetic.

One of his enthusiasms was astronomy, and the existence of the University of London Observatory is very largely due to his efforts. He had a deep knowledge of the early history of astronomy, and gave an excellent course on the subject.

... he transformed the teaching of astronomy in his College. He found it largely theoretical in its treatment, though under his predecessor and revered teacher Karl Pearson practical instruction had been given in a small observatory in the College grounds. He left it as a highly developed subject in many of its branches and as Director of an active University Observatory at Mill Hill.

All his old students will remember his lectures. Prepared with a characteristic thoroughness, they were delivered in a clear and unhesitating manner and illustrated by a supreme command of the blackboard. When in later life responsibilities crowded upon him, and his friends were amazed at the amount of work of different kinds that he could get through, nothing was allowed to diminish the care and attention he gave to his teaching work.

In assessing Filon's services to applied mathematics, it must be said that he was unsympathetic towards the modern developments of his subject. Relativity, particularly the "general theory", seemed to him to rest on too slender an experimental basis. He regarded it as a kind of pure mathematics that had drifted out of touch with reality. He modified this attitude somewhat in later years and made serious efforts in his lectures to put the "special" theory into logical form. For the quantum theorists, however, he had nothing but scorn. Their constantly changing hypotheses seemed to him to be sheer madness and the negation of that logical structure he expected to find in mechanics. As it was gradually borne in on him that the theory was actually producing good results, he found it very difficult to understand how this could possibly be.

Filon was a man of wide culture, and one who believed profoundly in the dignity of the academic profession. A congenial companion and a warm-hearted friend, he occasionally indulged in short bursts of irascibility, which, if they arose suddenly, as suddenly subsided. These outbreaks, so well known to his friends, were purely superficial disturbances, for fundamentally Filon was one of the most generous and kindly of men, who would put himself to great trouble even for those who had small claims on him. Nobody could be a pleasanter speaker or a better host.