by C. W. Kilmister
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Temple, George Frederick James (1901-1992), mathematician and Roman Catholic priest, was born on 2 September 1901 at 134 Wornington Road, North Kensington, London, the only son of James Temple (d. in or before 1917), railway inspector for the Great Western Railway, and his wife, Frances (Fanny), née Compton. His parents were English country folk from Oxfordshire. There is no record of previous scientific activity in the family. He went to Northfields elementary school and Ealing county school, which he left after less than five years because of the death of his father. His subsequent progress resulted from a combination of brilliance, diligence, and good fortune. In 1918 he enrolled at Birkbeck College. In the following year he was received into the Roman Catholic church. His faith formed his life. He had close friendships with a number of Dominicans and Benedictines, loving liturgy and theology, especially Aquinas.
In 1919 Temple became part-time research assistant in the Birkbeck physics department. He took the general honours BSc in 1922, and then became steward in the physics department and began to publish papers on A. N. Whitehead's theory of gravitation. At that time the differential geometry of Einstein's general relativity theory of gravitation was seen as forbidding, and Whitehead's alternative seemed attractive. Whitehead himself was on the point of leaving the chair at Imperial College and invited Temple there in 1924 as demonstrator in mathematics. Three more papers on general relativity were accepted by the University of London for a PhD in 1926. Whitehead's successor, Sydney Chapman, recognized Temple's ability and recommended him for an 1851 Exhibition scholarship. He spent the year 1928-9 at Imperial, working on the new wave mechanics of the atom. His mathematical character was now clear. He had an ability to find interesting problems before they were fashionable, to see through to the simplicity of the essentials, and to write a few important papers before seeking a new topic.
In 1928 Paul Dirac published his equation for the electron, which removed an unexplained anomaly in the fit of wave mechanics with experiment, conformed with the requirements of relativity, and yet was not of the expected mathematical form. Temple saw this as a challenge. He spent the second year of his 1851 research studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge, working under Sir Arthur Eddington, who had reacted in the same way to Dirac's equation. Temple answered the challenge by deriving Dirac's results in a more abstract algebraic way. Two highly original papers clarified the whole situation and established Temple as a first rank mathematician.
Temple left Cambridge in 1930 to become an assistant professor at Imperial College, and on 2 September the same year he married Dorothy Lydia Carson (1898-1979), eldest daughter of Thomas Ellis Carson, shipping office manager of Liverpool. Their marriage was exceedingly happy, and Temple's achievements owed an enormous debt to his wife's love and support. There were no children of the marriage.
In 1932 Temple was appointed to a chair at King's College, London, where he remained until 1953. The department was at a low ebb but once he was joined by J. G. Semple in 1936 they were able to turn it, over twenty years, into a leading research department. Two principal themes initially interested Temple. The success of the algebraic approach led him to an investigation of symbolic representation of algebraic forms which might prove useful in abbreviating the heavy algebra of general relativity. Quantum theory continued to exercise him until he concluded in 1935 that his earlier doubts were valid and that the theory contained a calamitous paradox. Characteristically he did not search for some modification of the theory or of his proof to avoid the paradox but simply gave up all work on it. His mathematics had to issue in the same kind of certainty that he enjoyed in Aquinas's theology.
The Second World War found Temple seconded to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, working both on supersonic aerodynamics and on various practical problems, notably 'shimmy', the wheel wobble of aircraft on landing. His ability to get to the essentials was shown over the de-icing of bombers' wings. He realized that any such equipment would mean a smaller bomb load, more bombers, and so increased losses from anti-aircraft fire. He concluded by advising better use of meteorology. He became an acknowledged expert in supersonic flight. The inadequacy of the mathematical foundations there and his quest for precision led him after the war to the use of generalized functions which, in a paper published in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society in 1953, he showed were equivalent to the distributions of Laurent Schwartz. This easy transition between pure and applied mathematics was another continuing characteristic.
On returning to King's in 1945 Temple (who was elected FRS in 1943) continued research over a wide field. He was principal scientific adviser to the minister of civil aviation from 1948 to 1950 and chairman of the Aeronautical Research Council from 1961 to 1964. He was appointed CBE in 1955. He was one of a group of leading scientists who led the foundation of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in 1948. He served as treasurer from 1952 to 1960, president from 1960 to 1964, and vice-president from 1964 to 1968.
In 1953 Temple succeeded Sydney Chapman as Sedleian professor of natural philosophy at Oxford. He used his relative freedom from administration to codify his previous work. Then in 1960 he used generalized functions to understand the geometric theories of de Rham, Whitney, and Hodge in several papers of great beauty and depth. He had long taken an interest in the history of mathematics and after his retirement from Oxford in 1968 he commenced work on 100 Years of Mathematics. This was not published until 1981. That it read like an authoritative survey of the century but included only the development of those fields in which he had worked made the book a monument to the breadth of his interests.
Following the death of his wife in 1979 Temple continued his long association with the Benedictines. He was admitted to Quarr Abbey, at Ryde, Isle of Wight in 1980. His solemn profession as a monk was in 1982 and he was ordained priest in 1983. He was diligent at liturgy and prayer and studied hard at theology and mathematics, the latter in a new field for him, the foundations. His aim was typically precise and ambitious: to construct a new theory from which the more usual bases for mathematics, set theory and logic, could be deduced and their consistency assured. His exposition was in manuscript form at his death at Kite Hill Nursing Home, Wootton Bridge, Isle of Wight, from prostate cancer on 30 January 1992. He was buried at Quarr Abbey. All his life he was a man of unfailing courtesy, wit, and kindness, though capable of trenchant criticism. His learning was recognized by four honorary doctorates and by the Sylvester medal of the Royal Society.
C. W. KILMISTER
Sources
MS notes as FRS, RS
C. W. Kilmister, Memoirs FRS, 40 (1994), 385-400
The Independent (4 Feb 1992)
The Times (5 Feb 1992)
WWW, 1991-5
personal knowledge (2004)
private information (2004)
b. cert.
m. cert.
d. cert.
Likenesses
photograph, repro. in Kilmister, Memoirs FRS, 384
photograph, repro. in The Times
portrait, repro. in The Independent
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