by B. H. Neumann
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Tanner [née Young], Rosalind Cecilia Hildegard [Cecily] (1900-1992), mathematician and historian of mathematics, was born in Göttingen, Germany, on 6 February 1900 and named Rosalinde Cäcilie Hildegard, the oldest of three daughters and second of six children of the first husband-and-wife team of creative research mathematicians, William Henry Young (1863-1942) and Grace Emily Young (née Chisholm) (1868-1944). A younger brother, Laurence Chisholm Young, and a niece, Sylvia M. Wiegand, daughter of Laurence, were also well-known professional mathematicians. The family lived in Göttingen until 1908, then in Geneva until 1915, and then in Lausanne until 1925. Cecily Young studied in Lausanne to her licence in mathematics and physics, and then, from 1925, like her mother, as a postgraduate student in Cambridge and, also like her mother, as a member of Girton College. Her PhD thesis of 1929, supervised by E. W. Hobson, earned her only the title of the degree, as women did not receive Cambridge degrees until after the Second World War. However, Girton College awarded her a fellowship until 1932. At that time during the depression appointments were very difficult to get and Cecily did not find one for a year, but in 1933 she joined the department of mathematics of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, where she remained until her retirement in 1967.
Cecily Young's research interests were mainly close to her parents' interests in mathematical analysis. Perhaps her most significant research was published in the Mathematische Annalen in 1931 ('The algebra of many-valued quantities') and the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, also in 1931 ('On many-valued Riemann-Stieltjes integration I, II'). She also translated mathematical texts from French and German into English. The most significant was her translation of a book by Konrad Knopp, Theorie und Anwendung der unendlichen Reihen, published as Theory and Application of Infinite Series (1925; 2nd edn, 1951). She collaborated with Sydney Chapman while he was at Imperial College on a textbook which was never finished. In 1939 she won the Gamble prize of Girton College with an essentially mathematics-historical essay. After the death of her parents she maintained their papers. On 3 September 1953 she married, in the Holy Trinity Church in Wallington, Surrey, Bernard William Tanner (1881-1954), an electrical engineer who had been the chief maintenance engineer at Imperial College, and who was nineteen years her senior, and widowed. He died only nine months after the marriage.
From 1953 onwards Cecily published under the name of Tanner, mostly in the history of mathematics, especially the history of inequalities. In the mid-1960s and to the end of her life her interest concentrated on Thomas Harriot, who had invented the symbols > and < to denote inequalities. About one-third of her published papers were in French, and a few were in German. From childhood she suffered from impaired hearing, which became more severe over the years and restricted her contacts outside her family, though she learned to lip-read and had many friends, especially among fellow mathematicians. She was a talented violinist, wrote poetry, and was intermittently a churchgoing Christian. She donated generously to a number of organizations, especially those concerned with her historical interests, at Oxford, Durham, and Cambridge. She died in the Mayday Hospital, Croydon, from bronchopneumonia, acute myeloid leukaemia, and congestive heart failure on 24 November 1992, and was cremated in Croydon.
B. H. NEUMANN
Sources
I. Grattan-Guinness, British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), 229-31
I. Grattan-Guinness, 'Cecily Tanner', British Society for the History of Mathematics Newsletter, 23 (1993), 10-15
m. cert.
d. cert.
private information (2004) [P. M. Neumann; I. Grattan-Guinness; Laurence Chisholm Young; Angela Young; Sylvia M. Wiegand; J. G. Fauvel; H. A. Priestley]
personal knowledge (2004)
Archives
U. Lpool L., William Henry Young and Grace Chisholm Young MSS
Wealth at death
£166,755: probate, 19 Feb 1993, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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