To mark International Women’s Day 2018, we are taking a look at the Whipple’s copy of The Theory of Sets of Points, and its co-author, Grace Chisholm Young.
Grace Chisholm Young (1868-1944) was an English mathematician, who studied mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge, and later earned her Ph.D. at Göttingen University in Germany. Women could not be formally admitted to degrees in Cambridge at this time, and were permitted to study only in associated – rather than fully incorporated – Colleges. Grace and her female peers appeared on a separate class list from their male counterparts, though her position on the list indicates that she achieved a first class mark when she took her final exams in 1892. She sat the Oxford mathematics exams on an unofficial basis in the same year, and gained the highest mark in the entire cohort, and in 1895 she completed her doctoral thesis on “The Algebraic Groups of Spherical Trigonometry”, becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate from a German university.
Grace married fellow mathematician William Henry Young in 1896, and they collaborated on a number of papers and books throughout her career – though her son commented some years later that “by far the greater part of their collaboration was behind the scenes of the very large number of papers published by W. H. Young”. Together they published 214 papers and several books. Collaborations where she did not appear as a co-author were acknowledged from time to time in W. H. Young’s papers, and personal correspondence between the couple indicates that they did discuss the division of labour and her relative lack of recognition: he wrote “The fact is our papers ought to be published under our joint names, but if this were done neither of us gets the benefit of it.”
The Theory of Sets of Points, the first textbook in English on the subject of set theory, was published under both of their names in 1906. In the preface, William wrote “Any reference to the constant assistance which I have received during my work from my wife is superfluous, since, with the permission of the Syndics of the Press, her name has been associated with mine on the title page.”
We acquired Grace’s copy of The Theory of Sets of Points through the Whipple Fund in March 2016, and it currently features in our Marginalia display as it contains a tremendous variety of annotations, corrections, addenda, and refinements for a proposed second edition (which was not completed by the authors, but this copy was eventually used to produce it). These notes were mainly written by Grace. There is also a wealth of private correspondence, pictures, postcards and letters from other mathematicians, and reviews of the first edition. Grace has pasted in photographs of her husband and their youngest son Laurie, and a watercolour of the latter with ‘ivy in his golden hair’.
With the amount of material present in this volume, it has become a fascinating palimpsest of the personal and professional life of a ground-breaking female mathematician.
References
Rothman, P., 1996. Grace Chisholm Young and the Division of Laurels. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 50, 89–100.
Grattan-Guinness, I., 2004-09-23. Young [née Chisholm], Grace Emily (1868–1944), mathematician. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Date of access 9 Mar. 2018, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-45779>
James, library assistant
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