Alfred Young

Alfred Young was a British mathematician, a Fellow of the Royal Society, known for his work in group theory. Born in Widnes, Lancashire in 1873, he was educated at Monkton Combe School and Clare College, Cambridge, and lectured at Selwyn College and then Clare College. He became an ordained clergyman in 1908 and was parish priest at Birdbrook in Essex, writing most of his papers on invariant theory and the symmetric group there. Young diagrams and Young tableaux, which he introduced in 1900, are named after him, and his ideas have influenced representation theory, combinatorics, invariant theory, physics and chemistry.