Watson, George Neville

(1886-1965), mathematician

by J. M. Whittaker, rev. Ian N. Sneddon

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Watson, George Neville (1886-1965), mathematician, was born at Westward Ho!, Devon, on 31 January 1886, the elder child and only son of George Wentworth Watson, a schoolmaster and later an army coach, and his wife, Mary Justina, daughter of the Revd George Sandhorn Griffith, rector of Ardley, Oxfordshire. His father was an eminent genealogist who later took a large part in preparing both editions of Vicary Gibbs's The Complete Peerage. Watson was educated at St Paul's School, at that time a distinguished nursery of senior wranglers and Smith's prizemen. Among his contemporaries was the mathematician J. E. Littlewood. Watson went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as an entrance scholar in 1904 and was senior wrangler in 1907. In 1908 he was placed in the second division of the first class of the mathematical tripos. The younger fellows of Trinity at this time included three very distinguished workers in complex variable theory, the field in which Watson was to specialize: Edmund T. Whittaker, E. W. Barnes, and G. H. Hardy. Although Whittaker left in 1906 and Barnes's interests were turning away from mathematics, their influence was very evident in Watson's early papers, which gained him a Smith's prize in 1909 and a Trinity fellowship in 1910. He left Cambridge in 1914 to become assistant lecturer at University College, London.

The four years which Watson spent in London were very fruitful. It is often the case in problems of mathematical physics that a solution can be obtained in the form of an infinite series or an integral but comparison with observation is frustrated because the solution does not lend itself to numerical computation. Watson's most valuable gift was his ability to bridge this gap. A striking example occurred in 1918, when he became involved in a discussion among applied mathematicians of the best way to explain the propagation of radio waves. The standard model, a Hertzian oscillator in an infinite dielectric surrounding a partially conducting sphere, yielded solutions, but not in a form which could be compared with observation. Although Watson was not much interested in problems of physics he was generous in helping those who were, and when asked to bring his unique expertise to bear on the problem, he was able to show that the model was inadequate since it predicted an attenuation of the radio signal far more rapid than was observed. He was then asked to re-examine the question on the hypothesis that there was a conducting layer in the upper atmosphere as suggested by Oliver Heaviside. He showed that this did, indeed, account for the observations, provided that the layer was at a height of 100 km and of a certain conductivity.

Watson left London in 1918 to become Mason professor of pure mathematics in the University of Birmingham and continued in this post until his retirement in 1951. Though a man of enormous industry, he was a solitary worker and did not found a research school. Much of his time in the early years was devoted to writing an immense treatise on Bessel functions (1922), of unparalleled quality. He had already, while in London, collaborated with his old teacher, Whittaker, in publishing in 1915 a second, and greatly enlarged, edition of the latter's A Course of Modern Analysis (1902), the first English work on real- and complex-variable theory addressed to undergraduates. Further revised editions followed in 1920 and 1927; the fourth and standard edition was still being reprinted as late as 1980.

In 1925 Watson married Elfrida Gwenfil, daughter of Thomas Lane, a farmer of Holbeach, Lincolnshire. They had one son. For Watson the decade 1929-39 was largely devoted to elucidating the work of the remarkable, almost self-taught, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who had been in England in 1914 and died in his native India in 1920. Ramanujan rarely gave proofs of his statements and some were not correct. Watson wrote some twenty-five papers connected with his work, and copied out the whole of his notebooks in beautiful handwriting. These are now in the Mathematical Institute, Oxford.

Watson was an untiring worker on behalf of the London Mathematical Society, above all as editor of its Proceedings. He was its president in 1932-3 and was awarded the De Morgan medal in 1947. He was elected FRS in 1919 and received the Sylvester medal in 1946. He was an honorary FRSE and received honorary degrees from Edinburgh and Dublin. Birmingham University chose the name Watson Building for a new building containing, among others, the mathematics departments. In appearance he was dark, and of spare build. Though mathematics was his absorbing interest he was also expert in his private hobbies of railway history and postage stamps. He was a devoted son of Trinity and prints of the college and its members covered his walls. He died at home, 46 Warwick New Road, Leamington Spa, on 2 February 1965, survived by his wife.

J. M. WHITTAKER, rev. IAN N. SNEDDON

Sources  
J. M. Whittaker, Memoirs FRS, 12 (1966), 521-30
Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 1st ser., 41 (1966), 551-65
personal knowledge (1981)
private information (2004)
CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1965)

Archives  
U. Birm. L., papers

Likenesses  
J. Russell & Sons, photograph, RS [see illus.]

Wealth at death  
£7525 0s. 0d.: probate, 1965, CGPLA Eng. & Wales


© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

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