Alison Catherine Falconer Dillon
Quick Info
Newington, Edinburgh, Scotland
Wembley, London, England
Biography
Before we give Alison Dillon's biography, we explain why we have included her in our archive. There are three reasons. First, Alison was an exceptionally good mathematician who chose to teach mathematics. She was an outstanding teacher and we include her as a representative of the many outstanding teachers who are so important to the development of the subject but are 'unknowns'. The second reason is personal. Much of the research for Alison's biography was done by Tony Gardiner and he was keen that people such as Alison were better known. I [EFR] knew Tony Gardiner from the time we were research students together at the University of Warwick in the 1960s and was saddened to hear of his death in January 2024. The third reason is that she has a local connection, having been at school in St Andrews.Alison Dillon was given the name Alison Catherine Falconer at her birth and only became known as Alison Dillon after her marriage in 1955. Her parents were Herbert Francis Falconer (1878-1927) and Laura Margaret Somerville (1891-1983). Herbert Falconer, born on 15 August 1878 to the Rev William Meek Falconer and Isabella Catherine Paterson in Newington, Edinburgh, attended the Edinburgh Academy from 1890 to 1896. He trained to become an actuary and, at the time of the 1901 census, he was living with his parents at 21 West Mayfield, Edinburgh and was working as an actuary with Scottish Life. He became a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries and then studied at Edinburgh University. When a divinity student he sailed from Glasgow to Quebec, Canada as a missionary, arriving on 26 April 1910. Herbert Falconer married Laura Margaret Somerville at St Andrew's Church in Edinburgh in 1917. Laura Somerville had been born in Crieff on 24 August 1891 to James Ewing Somerville and Margaret Stewart Sandeman. Herbert and Laura Falconer had three daughters: Jacqueline Stewart Falconer (1918-2010), Alison Catherine Falconer (1920-2011), the subject of this biography, and Gillian Laura Condie Falconer (1926-2016).
The first two Falconer daughters were born in Newington, Edinburgh, when the family were living at 13 Dryden Place, but by the time the third daughter Gillian was born Herbert was a minister in the United Free Church and the family were living in the Blackadder Manse, North Berwick, near Edinburgh. Before Alison had reached the age of seven, however, her father had died. He went to visit a parishioner without putting on his coat and was drenched in heavy rain. He caught a severe chill and died several days later on 16 July 1927 at a nursing home at 19 Great King Street, Edinburgh. One of her two sons said [7]:-
The Manse was tied to Herbert's occupation, so the family was homeless; they had means, so Laura sought out the best Girl's School in Scotland free to ratepayers.The family certainly had means, for [12] shows that Herbert Falconer's estate was valued at £15583. This is equivalent to about 1.2 million pounds at the 2024 value of the pound. Laura Falconer decided to have a house built in St Andrews so she could send her three daughters to St Leonard's School. She purchased a plot of land and had a house built, which they name Mizzentop, at 14 Middleshade Road.
Alison began her studies at St Leonard's School, St Andrews, in 1934. St Leonard's School for Girls had been founded in 1877 and began in buildings which had been St Leonard's College, part of the University of St Andrews. While still a pupil at St Leonard's, she attended the St Andrews Colloquium in July of 1938. This indicates clearly that Alison Falconer was a quite exceptional student, attending a major international mathematical conference while still at school. She graduated from St Leonard's College in 1939 and in the same year was admitted to the University of Cambridge.
In October 1939 Alison Falconer entered Newnham College, Cambridge, to begin her studies of the mathematical tripos. Being a student during World War II was, of course, a very different experience from normal times. Falconer described the war work that students had to undertake in [4]. We give an extract from that article at THIS LINK.
From 1939 to 1942 she studied Parts I and II of the mathematical tripos. Her sons, who are not mathematicians, spoke a little to Tony Gardiner about what their mother told them from these years [7]:-
She told me one day the lecturer put a theorem on the board and let them think about it. After a while, she attracted the lecturer's attention and asked "What should I do next?" The lecturer was stunned. The theorem was previously unsolved.While living in St Andrews, Falconer had known D'Arcy Thompson. From Newnham College, she wrote to him concerning the biography of Thomas Heath, the leading historian on ancient Greek mathematics, that he had written. She took the Part II examinations in 1942 and went on to study Part III. Because of the war the Part III class was very small, consisting only of five students, but they were quite a remarkable group of students. In addition to Alison Falconer, there was Fritz Ursell, Freeman Dyson, James Lighthill, and Tony Skyrme. Falconer was the oldest of the five having begun her university career in 1939. Fritz Ursell was Jewish and left Germany at the end of 1936 to escape from the extreme difficulties Jews were experiencing. He was admitted to Cambridge in 1940 was allowed to complete the 2-year wartime undergraduate programme in 1942. Tony Skyrme, born in Lewisham, England, studied at Eton College before winning a scholarship to take the same 2-year wartime undergraduate programme as Ursell. Lighthill entered in 1941 and took both Part II examinations and Part III examinations in 1943. Dyson did the same as Lighthill, also taking both Part II and Part III in 1943.
We note that three of this remarkable collection of five students went on to become fellows of the Royal Society. Tony Gardiner, who was a colleague of Tony Skyrme at the University of Birmingham for many years, said that Skyrme deserved to be a fellow of the Royal Society. The particle, the skyrmion, named for Skyrme, is important in solid-state physics and was proposed by him in 1961. This led to him receiving the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society in 1985. From all the available evidence, it appears that Falconer was of similar mathematical ability as the other four students. Not only were they outstanding students, but they had outstanding teachers such as J E Littlewood, W V D Hodge, C V Durell, P A M Dirac, G H Hardy, and A S Besicovitch.
Taking Part III did not mean that Falconer could avoid war work. One of her sons said [7]:-
She was not at Bletchley Park, of that I am quite sure. In the war she was collected and taken blindfolded in a car to a site, I think she called it Q, where I believe she taught the airforce three dimensional vectors. She broke a toe stumbling and it was reset wrongly as she could never divulge what she had been doing for it to happen. I do not have an accurate date ...Before taking the Part III examinations, she applied for a position as an Assistant Lecturer in Mathematics at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and was accepted. In the spring of 1943 she went on a holiday with her fellow student Freeman Dyson. He wrote [6]:-
I remember Alison Falconer well from the two years 1941-1943 when we were undergraduates at Cambridge. She came from Scotland, and in the spring of 1943 she and I went together for a vigorous walking tour of the Cairngorm mountains, including a 25-mile transit of the Lairig Ghru pass over the Cairngorms from South to North. This was quite an adventure, since in wartime there were no tourists and no cars or buses on the roads. We were the only humans in that grand silence of the ancient highlands. We walked fast over the snow and ice to reach Aviemore before nightfall. Alison was a good companion but not an intimate friend. She shared my interests in literature and politics as well as mathematics, but we did not stay in touch after the Scottish holiday.In 1944 Freeman Dyson published the paper Some guesses in the theory of partitions in the student magazine Eureka. Immediately after the paper there is a poem by Alison Falconer [5]:-
Short vision
By A C Falconer
Thought is the only way which leads to life
All else is hollow spheres
Reflecting back
In heavy imitation
And blurred degeneration
A senseless image of our world of thought.
Man thinks he is the thought which gives him life!
He binds a sheaf and claims it as himself!
He is a ring through which pass swinging ropes
Which merely move a little as he slips.
The Ropes are Thought
The Space is Time
Could he but see, then he might climb.
In Freeman Dyson's commentary about the partitions paper in [2], he explains:-
All else is hollow spheres
Reflecting back
In heavy imitation
And blurred degeneration
A senseless image of our world of thought.
Man thinks he is the thought which gives him life!
He binds a sheaf and claims it as himself!
He is a ring through which pass swinging ropes
Which merely move a little as he slips.
The Ropes are Thought
The Space is Time
Could he but see, then he might climb.
Since there was half a page left over at the end of my paper, they put a poem by my friend Alison Falconer, who was a poet as well as a mathematician. I was glad to have a bit of poetry mixed in with the mathematics. Since the magazine is hard to find nowadays I take this opportunity to rescue the poem from oblivion.Dyson then quotes the poem in the commentary in [2], although today the poem is not hard to find since the Eureka magazine is on the web.
Let us pause our biography of Alison Falconer at this point and say a little about her two sisters. Jacqueline Stewart Falconer, the eldest of the three sisters, studied physiology at University College, London. Awarded a B.Sc. she was appointed as a Demonstrator in Physiology in the Department of Physiology, Biochemistry and Pharmacology of King's College London in 1941. In 1944 she was appointed as a lecturer in the Physiology Department, Medical School, University of Newcastle. She remained in that Department for the rest of her career and died on 27 February 2010 at the age of 91. Alison's younger sister Gillian Laura Falconer studied history at Somerville College, where she became friends with Margaret Roberts, later known as Margaret Thatcher, who became Prime Minister. She returned to the family home in St Andrews and lived there with her mother [10]:-
Passionate about art and design, she was skilled at screen printing, some of her designs taken by Liberty and the National Trust. Miss Falconer never married, after the man she described as the "right one" died in a motorbike accident before they could wed.Gillian Falconer died in 2016 and left over 4 million pounds which she had made through stocks and shares [10]:-
More than £1.4m of her fortune was shared out between family and friends, with the rest divided between several causes, also including Somerville College in Oxford, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the National Trust, the Carlisle Overseas Aid Trust and the John Muir Trust.Alison Falconer was a mathematics lecturer at Royal Holloway College from 1943 to 1948. During 1948 she was seconded as part of the Marshall Plan to tour Germany and The Netherlands as a member of a team selecting school teachers. She was well qualified for this since not only did she have the mathematical skills but she was fluent in German.
In 1948 Falconer left her position at Royal Holloway College and over the following few years taught at various different establishments. She lectured at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London from 1948 to 1950 (it became the University of Westminster in 1992), then from 1950 to 1955 at Westminster College of Commerce. From 1951 to 1955 she was employed as a Lecturer: London County Council Establishment. One of her sons said [6]:-
... she was lecturing on five sites in London. At the same time she was studying externally for a second degree in economics! The exams were set centrally and she had to explain to the Registrar the need to make alternative arrangements, because "the mathematics exam for my economics course seems to be the one I have set myself!"She had another job which was to have a major effect on her life. She was employed by the US Air Force to teach mathematics at the Air Force Education Centre in South Ruislip. The courses she gave were part of the University of Maryland Extension Courses which many service men took advantage of. One of the people she taught was John Daniel Dillon (1925-1995). Dillon had been born in Troy, Rensselaer, New York, USA on 26 November 1925 to John D Dillon Sr and Dorothy W Clark. Alison Falconer and John Dillon were married in September 1955. The following newspaper report appeared in May 1956 [13]:-
M Sgt John D Dillon, son of Mrs Dorothy C Dillon of 501 Pinewoods Avenue, will be a member of the 1956 graduating class connected with the University of Maryland's Overseas Program, which will be held 26 May at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.Alison and John Dillon had three children, Caroline Wheelock Somerville Dillon (1956-1980), John Daniel Dillon III (born 1959) and Oliver L J Dillon (born 1961). Caroline Dillon died of Hodgkins' lymphoma in Newcastle upon Tyne on 9 March 1980. Alison looked after her children and, working from home, did some postal tuition and examining. In 1967, with all of her children at school, she became a mathematics teacher at John Lyon School. Established in 1876 by the governors of Harrow School, this academically selective private day school is in Harrow on the Hill, Greater London. When Alison Dillon taught there from 1967 to 1985 it was a boys' school teaching pupils from 11 to 18 years old.
Sgt Dillon, who is stationed at South Ruislip Air Force Education Center, South Ruislip, England, took all his University of Maryland credits at the South Ruislip Center, having transferred no other credits from any other university.
A native of East Hartford, Conn, Sgt Dillon is married to his former mathematics teacher at the South Ruislip Center, Miss Alison Falconer. She is still teaching her mathematics class while he is currently attending a class in military logistics.
His job in the Air Force is that of a disbursing supervisor at the West Drayton Air Force base, a few miles outside London. He is also currently taking graduate work at the London School of Economics.
We began this biography by saying that Alison Falconer was an exceptional mathematics teacher but we have not yet offered much justification for that statement. Let us give rectify this by quoting from one of her former A-level students at John Lyon School [6]:-
Mrs Dillon taught for the glory and joy of the subject. I think she regarded the attainment of a good A-level result as a natural by-product of good teaching, rather than the primary goal of our endeavours. Her philosophy was that worthwhile things should be done for their own sake, and not just to meet some puny little target. There were plenty of excursions beyond the syllabus. It was wonderful preparation for university.While Alison Dillon taught at John Lyon School, the family lived at 22 Lindon Avenue, Wembley, London and continued to live there after she retired in 1985. John Dillon died on 25 January 1995. Alison died on 28 January 2011 aged 90. Her funeral was held at Breakspear Crematorium on Thursday 10 February 2011.
The lessons were hard work and stretching; nothing sloppy was tolerated - any hint of the casual would meet with the reprimand, "nothing is obvious until it has been proved." She seemed to have known personally just about every famous mathematician I had ever heard of (alive or not). All was sharp, fresh and energetic. One of our number once enquired: "Mrs Dillon, what is the use of the sine rule?" The lightening response was: "Well, I use it to design looms." - weaving being just one of her many hobbies. Mrs Dillon was interested in everything. My 35 year career in research has been underpinned by her teaching and by her approach. My only regret is that we were too young to realise how special and very talented she really was.
Let us end with the following tribute by Tony Gardiner [6]:-
Like all the best mathematics teachers, Alison's impact cannot be easily summarised in words. Unlike the best mathematicians, mathematics teachers do not have outwardly impressive careers or CVs. Alison left her mark on her students through her distinctive love of the subject, through her unique teaching style, and through the unusual breadth of her interests. In recognition of this, nearly 40 years after she retired, her old school recently introduced the "Dillon Diploma" for students aged 11-14, designed to encourage them to develop an approach to learning and to life that goes way beyond the formal curriculum.It is worth quoting from [14] regarding the Dillon Diploma:-
Whilst the 21st century has brought many new opportunities to pupils in education, there are an increasing number of challenges that pupils must face when they enter the wider world beyond school.
To address these challenges we launched the Dillon Diploma. This diploma is designed to enhance and develop students as individuals alongside their academic studies, giving them the ability to become more resilient to a variety of different future scenarios. The diploma is named after Alison Dillon, who was appointed by then Head Boyd Campbell as John Lyon's first female teacher, serving as a Mathematics teacher between the years 1967 and 1985. She was truly inspirational and is fondly remembered by Old Lyonians for delivering lessons that went above and beyond the core curriculum. Thus, enabling students to gain places at some of the UK's top universities as well as leading very successful careers.
The Dillon Diploma comprises six key modules, which each pupil will study over the first three years of their time in senior school. Each module contributes a new skill which will be developed between Year 7 and Year 9. At the heart of the diploma are the eight school values. Pupils are encouraged to be ambitious, innovative, creative and strive for excellence in all the modules. In reading, pupils will be challenged with studying academic articles and journals thereby improving their analytical and reviewing skills. ...
... pupils who complete the course will become more well-rounded individuals, equipped with a range of skills that will make them more resilient to challenges that they might face in the future, such as public examinations (including preparation for the Higher Project Qualification) and in their life beyond school. Moreover, pupils will become more independent and able to evaluate their own progress in future tasks.
References (show)
- Alison Catherine Falconer, ancestry.com.
- F J Dyson, Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson with Commentary (American Mathematical Society, 1996).
- Dillon, Alison Catherine (née Falconer), The Daily Telegraph (Wednesday 9 February 2011), 28.
- A C Dillon, WARWORK, in A Phillips (ed.), A Newnham anthology (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 201-203.
- A C Falconer, Short Vision, Eureka 8 (1944), 15.
- A D Gardiner, What makes a good maths teacher? The class of 1942-43, Mathematics in School 53 (3) (2024), 20-25.
- AD Gardiner, Alison who?, Mathematics in the times of crisis, British Society for the History of Mathematics (6 July 2020).
https://www.bshm.ac.uk/conference-talks-mathematics-times-crisis - Herbert Francis Falconer, ancestry.com.
- Laura Margaret Somerville, ancestry.com.
- C Peebles, St Andrews volunteer leaves most of £4 million fortune to good causes, The Courier (25 January 2018).
- The Scotsman (Monday 18 July 1927).
- The Scotsman (Friday 28 October 1927).
- The Times Record, Troy, New York (3 May 1956).
- Dillon Diploma, John Lyon School (2024).
https://www.johnlyon.org/school-life/dillon-diploma/
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Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update June 2024
Last Update June 2024