Alexander Aitken

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Dr. Alexander Aitken (1 April 1895–3 November 1967) was one of New Zealand's greatest mathematicians. Aitken was one of the best mental calculators known and had a prodigious memory. He knew the first 1000 digits of pi, the 96 recurring digits of 1/97 and memorised the Aeneid in high school. He saw active service during World War I with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force at Gallipoli, in Egypt and at the Western Front. He was wounded at the Somme. However, his inability to forget the horrors he witnessed in World War I led to recurrent depression throughout his life. In a 1935 paper, he introduced the concept of generalised least squares, along with now standard vector/matrix notation for the linear regression model. Aitken spent his entire career at Edinburgh University, working as lecturer in Actuarial Mathematics & Statistics (1925–36), as Reader in Statistics (1936–46) and finally as Professor of Mathematics (1946–65). Aitken was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1936 and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Hon FRSNZ) in 1940 ,both for his work in statistics, algebra and numerical analysis. He was also an accomplished writer, being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1964 in response to the publication of his war memoirs.

Auckland University Press

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Alexander Aitken

Alexander Aitken

Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman