by W. V. D. Hodge, rev. J. J. Gray
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Baker, Henry Frederick (1866-1956), mathematician, was born at 1 Clement Court, Cambridge, on 3 July 1866, the son of Henry Baker, a domestic butler, and his wife, Sarah Ann Baker, née Britham. After attending various small schools he entered the Perse School, Cambridge. He was awarded a sizarship at St John's College, Cambridge, in the summer of 1883, but remained at school in order to prepare for the entrance scholarship examination to be held in the following December. He was elected to a foundation scholarship and began residence in October 1884. In 1887 he was bracketed senior wrangler with three others, and in the following year he was placed in the first division of the first class in part one of the mathematical tripos. He was elected into a fellowship of St John's College in 1888 and remained a fellow for nearly sixty-eight years. In 1889 he was awarded a Smith's prize.
In 1893 Baker married Lily Isabella Homfeld Klopp (1871-1903), daughter of Otto Charles Klopp, a merchant, of Homfeld House, Putney, and originally from Leer, Germany. They had two sons. He spent the whole of his working life in Cambridge, first as a college lecturer, then as a university lecturer (1895-1914), holding the special Cayley lectureship (1903-14), and finally as Lowndean professor of astronomy and geometry (1914-36). He was elected FRS in 1898 and received the Sylvester medal in 1910. He was awarded the De Morgan medal of the London Mathematical Society in 1905 and was president of the society in 1910 and 1911. In 1913 Baker married again, his first wife having died prematurely (aged thirty-two) in 1903. His second wife was Muriel Irene Woodyard (1885-1956), daughter of Henry Walter Woodyard, an engineer. She was eighteen years his junior. They had one daughter.
Baker's whole life was devoted to the service of mathematics, through research, and by his power to communicate his enthusiasm to his pupils. His researches covered a wide range of subjects, but chronologically they fall into two distinct periods. In the earlier period, which lasted until about 1911 or 1912, Baker's main interest was in the theory of algebraic functions and related topics, although his work on this often had a bearing on other branches of pure mathematics, to which he made useful contributions from time to time. Subjects on which he wrote included invariant theory, differential equations, and Lie groups; moreover, his work on algebraic functions led him, after the turn of the century, to consider wider problems in the theory of functions, especially functions of several complex variables. While many of Baker's papers were noteworthy in their day, it was his two books, Abel's Theorem and the Allied Theory, Including Theta Functions (1897) and An Introduction to the Theory of Multiply Periodic Functions (1907), which were his most lasting contributions to mathematics during this first period.
Some of the problems which Baker was considering when he wrote Multiply Periodic Functions led him to take an interest in geometry; on the one hand he came to read T. Reye's Geometrie der Lage, and on the other he came in contact with the work of the Italian school of geometers on the theory of complex algebraic surfaces. Their work, and the closely related analytic theory of émile Picard, achieved the difficult generalization of Riemann's ideas from one complex variable to two. These subjects fascinated him, and he soon began to write on them. He made the work of the Italian geometers the subject of his presidential address to the London Mathematical Society in 1911 which became one of the classic surveys of the subject, and he was soon recognized as a leader of British geometers. On the death of the Lowndean professor, Sir Robert Ball, in November 1913, Baker was the obvious choice of those electors to the chair who wished to appoint a geometer. It was, however, contested by other electors who wished to continue the astronomical traditions of the chair. The deadlock was only broken when, quite exceptionally, the appointment was passed to the chancellor, who selected Baker. Baker had no intention, however, of neglecting that part of his responsibilities which related to astronomy, and for many years he lectured with considerable success on gravitational astronomy and wrote some useful papers on this subject. He was among the first in Britain to understand Poincaré's novel reformulation of celestial mechanics. For the rest of his life, however, his real love was geometry; for over twenty years he taught and wrote on it, and it is for the work done as a professor that he will best be remembered. His own contributions are summed up in a treatise of six volumes, entitled Principles of Geometry (1922-33). He continued working on geometry after his retirement and published his last paper when he was eighty-six.
Baker's standing as a mathematician has to be judged against the background of the mathematical traditions in the university. He early came under the influence of Arthur Cayley and from him derived his concern with algebraic manipulations. But Cayley was an old man and pure mathematics in Cambridge had little in common with the exciting things which were going on in the subject on the continent. A. R. Forsyth, who succeeded Cayley as professor in 1895, strove hard to bring the continental ideas into Cambridge, but was not himself able to assimilate the continental standards of rigour. Baker, who learned much during visits paid to Klein at Göttingen, picked up these standards by reading the works of Leopold Kronecker and Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass as a young man. He was a better mathematician than Forsyth, and presented the advanced theory of complex functions in a much more comprehensive, comprehensible, and therefore influential way. His early training, however, led him to prefer the objectives of the older Cambridge mathematicians, using the new ideas primarily as tools. The result was that in his fifties he was little affected by the revolution brought about among the Cambridge mathematical analysts by G. H. Hardy in the first decade of the twentieth century. During this period Baker's position was essentially that of one of the leaders of the older generation.
When he changed his interests to geometry, Baker again came to the subject at an awkward stage. In spite of the great advances which the Italians had achieved in the theory of surfaces, it was already apparent that their methods were not proving adequate, and indeed the proofs of a number of the most important theorems had already been shown to be faulty. Baker did not invent any new methods and his work was largely devoted to examining the difficulties, and to using algebraic methods of the type used years before by Cayley to examine special cases. This he did extremely well, but his work served to make it still clearer that radical changes in approach were necessary before real progress could be made. This was not the case in projective geometry. In that field there were no structural problems, and each individual problem was an end in itself. It was here that Baker was at his best, for at heart he believed that the object of mathematics was to solve special problems completely, basic principles and general theories being of less interest to him. The fact that Baker did not achieve any major breakthrough was to a large degree due to his native modesty; he had an admiration amounting to veneration for the great masters of mathematics, and he could not imagine that he could ever take his place beside them.
While Baker's original contributions to mathematics were considerable, his forte lay in expounding the work of others and in inspiring the younger generation of geometers. In this last he was conspicuously successful. Between 1920 and 1936 he attracted around him a large following of young and enthusiastic geometers, many of whom won Smith's prizes and subsequently achieved high positions. An important feature of the school he founded was his Saturday afternoon seminar or 'tea party', one of the earliest seminars held in Cambridge. This was the focus of the great activity in geometry which he stirred up, and was the essential key to his success.
In appearance Baker was a heavily built man, with a thick moustache. This made him rather formidable to strangers and as he was also very shy some found him difficult to approach at first. But once the barriers were broken down his pupils found him less awe-inspiring, although they always treated him with great respect. The protocol at his tea parties was strict, and a pupil could not stay away without an acceptable excuse, but provided the rules were obeyed the atmosphere was extremely friendly. Baker died at his home, 3 Storeys Way, Cambridge, on 17 March 1956, and his widow survived him by only a few months.
W. V. D. HODGE, rev. J. J. GRAY
Sources
W. V. D. Hodge, Memoirs FRS, 2 (1956), 49-68
private information (1956)
personal knowledge (1956)
The Times (19 March 1956)
J. J. Gray, 'Mathematics in Cambridge and beyond', Cambridge minds, ed. R. Mason (1994), 86-99
J. J. Gray, 'Algebraic geometry in the late nineteenth century', The history of modern mathematics, ed. D. E. Rowe and J. McCleary, 1: Ideas and their reception (1989), 361-85
b. cert.
d. cert.
CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1956)
Archives
St John Cam., letters to Sir F. Larmor
Likenesses
W. Stoneman, photograph, 1926, NPG [see illus.]
Maull & Fox, photograph, RS
Russell & Sons, photograph, RS
Wealth at death
£14,376 4s. 11d.: probate, 13 July 1956, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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