Grace Chisholm Young Biography

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World of Mathematics on Grace Chisholm Young

A distinguished mathematician, Grace Chisholm Young is recognized as being the first woman to officially receive a Ph.D. in any field from a German university. Working closely with her husband, mathematician William Henry Young, she produced a large body of published work that made contributions to both pure and applied mathematics.

Grace Emily Chisholm Young was born on March 15, 1868, in Haslemere, Surrey, England, to Anna Louisa Bell and Henry William Chisholm. Her father was a British career civil servant who (following his own father) rose through the ranks to become the chief of Britain's weights and measures. Grace Emily Chisholm was the youngest of three surviving children. Her brother, Hugh Chisholm, enjoyed a distinguished career as editor of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

As befitted a girl of her social class, Young received an education at home. Forbidden by her mother to study medicine--which the youngster wanted to do--she entered Girton College, Cambridge (one of two women's colleges there) in 1889. She was 21 years of age, and the institution's Sir Francis Goldschmid Scholar of mathematics. In 1892 she graduated with first-class honors, then sat informally for the final mathematics examinations at Oxford; there, she placed first. In 1893 she transferred to Göttingen University in Germany, where she attended lectures and produced a dissertation entitled "The Algebraic Groups of Spherical Trigonometry" under noted mathematician Felix Klein. In 1895 she became the first woman to receive a Göttingen doctorate in any subject. The degree bore the distinction magna cum laude.

She returned to London and married her former Girton tutor, William Henry Young, who had devoted years to coaching Cambridge students. After the birth of their first child, the Youngs moved to Göttingen. There, William Young began a distinguished research career in mathematics, which would be supported in large part by the work of his wife. Grace Chisholm Young studied anatomy at the university and raised their six children, while collaborating with her husband on mathematics in both co-authored papers and those published under his name alone. In 1905 the pair authored a widely regarded textbook on set theory. Grace Chisholm Young's most important work was achieved between 1914 and 1916, during which time she published several papers on derivates of real functions; in this work she contributed to what is known as the Denjoy-Saks-Young theorem.

The Young family lived modestly, and William Young traveled frequently to earn money by teaching. In 1908, with the birth of their sixth child, the Youngs moved from Göttingen to Geneva. William Young continually sought a well-paying professorship in England, but he failed to obtain such a position; in 1913 he obtained a lucrative professorship in Calcutta, which required his residence for only a few months per year, and after World War I he became professor at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth for several years. Switzerland, however, remained the family's permanent home.

With advancing years, Grace Chisholm Young's mathematical productivity waned; in 1929 she began an ambitious historical novel, which was never published. Writing fiction was but one of her many varied interests, which included music, languages, and medicine. She also wrote children's books, in which she introduced notions of science. Her children followed the path she had pioneered, becoming accomplished scholars of mathematics, chemistry, and medicine. Her son Frank, a British aviator, died during World War I.

Grace Chisholm Young had lived with her husband's extended absences for her entire married life, and the spring of 1940 found them separated again: she in England, and he in Switzerland. From that time onward, neither spouse was able to see the other again--both were prevented from doing so by the downfall of France during the war. William Young died in 1942, and Grace Chisholm Young died of a heart attack in 1944.