Arthur Lee Dixon, 1867-1955

Abstract

Arthur Lee Dixon was born at Pickering, Yorkshire, on 27 November 1867, the second of three sons of the Rev. G. T. Dixon, Wesleyan minister of Northallerton. His elder brother, A. C. Dixon, was also a distinguished mathematician, and a Fellow of this Society (see Obituary Notices , 2, 165 (1936)). A. L. Dixon was educated at Kingswood School, Bath (1879-85) and Worcester College, Oxford (1885-9), where he was a mathematical scholar. He was a Fellow of Merton College for the thirty-odd years 1891-1922, at first a Prize Fellow and then a Tutorial Fellow. He became Savilian Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1922 and held this chair until his voluntary retirement in 1945. He was elected into the Royal Society in 1912, and was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1924-5. Dixon was married in Paris in 1902 to Catherine, eldest daughter of Léon Rieder. The climate of Oxford proved disastrous to Mrs Dixon’s health and she was compelled to spend much of her married life outside Oxford, in Pau and elsewhere. There was one daughter of the marriage, who became Mrs F. J. Baden Fuller; after his wife’s death in 1930 it was with his daughter and her husband, in Sandgate, Kent, that Dixon made his home (a very happy home), and it was here that he died on 20 February 1955 in his eighty-eighth year.