by J. C. Burkill, rev. P. M. Cohn
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Ingham, Albert Edward (1900-1967), mathematician, was born at Northampton on 3 April 1900, the son of Albert Edward Ingham (1875-1954) and his wife, Annie Gertrude Whitworth (1875-1923). He had an elder brother and three younger sisters. His father was a craftsman employed by a firm of boot and shoe manufacturers and was awarded a modest honorarium for the original idea of making shoes waterproof--the 'veldtschoen'. Ingham was educated in Northampton and at King Edward VI's Grammar School, Stafford, where he won the available prizes for academic achievement. In December 1917 he gained an entrance scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, going into residence in January 1919 after a few months in the army. In part two of the mathematical tripos (1921) he was a wrangler with distinction and in 1923 won a Smith's prize and an 1851 senior exhibition.
In 1922, his first year of candidature, Ingham was elected a prize fellow of Trinity, Cambridge. The electors saw in his dissertation a depth and maturity already marking him out as a leading scholar of his generation. He enjoyed four years of research (1922-6) without commitments to teach, spending some months in Göttingen. In 1926 he was appointed reader in the University of Leeds. In 1930, on the sudden and untimely death of F. P. Ramsey, he returned to Cambridge as fellow and director of studies at King's College, with a university lectureship. Ingham was an outstanding member of the G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood school of mathematical analysis, which from its beginnings in the first decade of the twentieth century attained worldwide fame in the third. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1945. In 1953 (after two years as Cayley lecturer) he was appointed reader in mathematical analysis. He retired from regular college teaching in 1957.
Ingham was meticulously accurate; nothing slipshod came from his hand, his tongue, or his pen. A successful lecturer and tutor, he encouraged his pupils to aim for perfection. By nature shy, modest, and reserved, he was friendly and hospitable, kind to anyone lonely or troubled, and quick to win the affection of children. He had no car, radio, or television set. He was an expert photographer, and enjoyed cricket as both spectator and player.
Ingham's thirty-two research papers, models of incisive reasoning, solved difficult problems and opened up avenues for other workers. Ingham's method and Ingham's theorem are quoted repeatedly in mathematical works. His one book, The Distribution of Prime Numbers (1932), is a classic and his perspicacious and meticulous editing of the papers in number-theory in volume two of G. H. Hardy's Collected Papers (1967) has proved most valuable.
From 1932 Ingham had the devoted support of his wife Rose Marie (Jane; 1897-1982) , a botanist and daughter of Canon Albert Darell Tupper-Carey. They had two sons, Michael and Stephen. Michael, an astronomer, followed his father in 1961 as a fellow of King's; later he moved to the observatory at Oxford, and became a fellow of New College in 1968. Stephen graduated in mathematics at New College, Oxford, in 1959 and entered the oil industry.
Every summer Ingham and his wife walked among mountains, and it was on such a holiday that he died. On 6 September 1967, on a high path near Mont Buet in France, his heart failed; he lived for only a few hours before he died in a mountain shelter, the refuge de la Pierre à Berard, Vallorcine, Haute Savoie. His body was cremated in Geneva the same day, and his ashes were scattered in Hayley Wood, near Cambridge.
J. C. BURKILL, rev. P. M. COHN
Sources
WW
J. C. Burkill, Memoirs FRS, 14 (1968), 271-86
personal knowledge (1981)
private information (2004)
CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1967)
Archives
Trinity Cam., corresp. | Trinity Cam., corresp. with Harold Davenport
Likenesses
photograph, priv. coll. [see illus.]
photograph, repro. in Burkill, Memoirs FRS
Wealth at death
£13,153: probate, 15 Dec 1967, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34099]
GO TO THE OUP ARTICLE (Sign-in required)