MacTutor
Alfred Lodge, who died at Oxford on December 1 of last year, so far outlived his contemporaries that it is scarcely possible now to see him through their eyes. Born in 1854, educated at Horncastle Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was elected to a Fereday fellowship at St. John's College, Oxford, in 1876, and appointed in 1884 to the staff of the Royal Indian Engineering College, Coopers Hill, where he currently succeeded Wolstenholme as professor of pure mathematics. On the dissolution of the College in 1904, he became a master at Charterhouse, and there he remained until after the Great War. Lodge's work in mathematics was all of the most elementary kind, but he was an enlightening teacher and a tireless worker As a teacher, he was active in the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching, and when that society broadened its basis to become the Mathematical Association, he was appropriately the first president to bear the new title; to the end of his life, he was a familiar figure at the meetings of the Association.
As a computerist, Lodge was a member for fifty years of the British Association Committee on Mathematical Tables, and it is in the publications of that Committee that his name will survive; if he did little to improve the technique of computing, he labored incessantly in practice, and work of his is incorporated in many of the reports, in the volume of miscellaneous tables published in 1931, in a factor table published in 1935, and in a volume of tables of Bessel functions which has just appeared; in addition to computing, he took a willing share in the discussions of the Committee and in the toil of proof-reading.
Sir Oliver Lodge writes of his brother, "He was always willing to work away in the background.... I have many dim recollections of his willing self-sacrifice for the family in early days." He was a Secretary of Section A (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) of the British Association from 1888 until 1892, and from 1893 until 1896 he was recorder of the Section, a position so unusual for a mathematician that his appointment must be taken as a tribute to the confidence which he inspired; he served on the Council of the British Association from 1913 until 1915. The volume of tables of Bessel functions which has been mentioned is "Inscribed to their friend Alfred Lodge by his colleagues on the Committee" as a token of the warmest affection. These glimpses, which belong to different periods and come from different directions, converge: Alfred Lodge was a worthy member of the eminent family to which he belonged; his long life was a useful one, and he was a lovable man who was happy in being well loved.
E. H. N
As a computerist, Lodge was a member for fifty years of the British Association Committee on Mathematical Tables, and it is in the publications of that Committee that his name will survive; if he did little to improve the technique of computing, he labored incessantly in practice, and work of his is incorporated in many of the reports, in the volume of miscellaneous tables published in 1931, in a factor table published in 1935, and in a volume of tables of Bessel functions which has just appeared; in addition to computing, he took a willing share in the discussions of the Committee and in the toil of proof-reading.
Sir Oliver Lodge writes of his brother, "He was always willing to work away in the background.... I have many dim recollections of his willing self-sacrifice for the family in early days." He was a Secretary of Section A (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) of the British Association from 1888 until 1892, and from 1893 until 1896 he was recorder of the Section, a position so unusual for a mathematician that his appointment must be taken as a tribute to the confidence which he inspired; he served on the Council of the British Association from 1913 until 1915. The volume of tables of Bessel functions which has been mentioned is "Inscribed to their friend Alfred Lodge by his colleagues on the Committee" as a token of the warmest affection. These glimpses, which belong to different periods and come from different directions, converge: Alfred Lodge was a worthy member of the eminent family to which he belonged; his long life was a useful one, and he was a lovable man who was happy in being well loved.
E. H. N