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Professor Augustus Edward Hough Love (1863-1940)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Edward_Hough_Love

Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Oxford and Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford

Up to a very short time before his death he was fulfilling the full duties of his Chair, lecturing and attending meetings of the Sub-Faculty of Mathematics. To the end he retained full use of all his faculties, and there was never any apparent dimming of the acuteness with which he would deal with University business, the precision of his lecturing, or the wisdom and judgment which he contributed to matters of current policy.

He never forsook the society of his colleagues as they gathered at their informal lunch club before meetings of the Sub-Faculty.

He last examined in the Final Honours School of Mathematics in 1936 at the age of seventy-three; I once heard an Oxford colleague say: 'We are none of us as good as Love at that game'.

Love's standards in all matters were of the highest. No trouble was too much for him to take, in the matter of the preparation of lectures or examination papers, and he never indicated whether some of his self-allotted tasks might have been personally distatesful to him. Though his interests were in the fields of mechanics, elasticity, geodynamics and electrodynamics, he prepared advanced courses of lectures on tensor calculus and general relativity.

His lectures were extremely popular with students for their clarity, intelligibility and real efforts to enter into the students' point of view. He could rapidly size up any piece of research that came before him, in thesis or other form, and his judgment on a mathematical matter was rarely at fault.

Love was a man whose striking candour and honesty as to his own aims and achievements were very noticeable - of great modesty in regard to his personal achievements - of great generosity and kindliness, especially to younger men.

He had interests in travel and in music. When he and the late Professor Hobson drove across Norway on one occasion he used to delight to relate how they entertained one another by singing. This is perhaps the occasion to mention his hobby of croquet, at which his prowess was considerable: as regularly as the swllows brought the summer, Love was to be seen wielding a mallet in the Parks, with doughty energy and evident enjoyment. It is not least here that his characteristic figure will be missed.

Love will be remembered by his two major works, SOME PROBLEMS OF GEODYNAMICS (1911) and A TREATISE ON THE MATHEMATAICAL THEORY OF ELASTICITY (first published in two volumes in 1892 and 1893; second edition, largely re-written, 1906; third edition, 1920).

It is given to few men of science to be at once fundamental discoverers and great expositors. Love was both. The ELASTICITY stands with Lamb's HYDRODYNAMICS, in a small, highly select class, and it challenges and survvives the closest comparison with its fellows. And the discovery of the transverse surface waves in a heterogeneous medium shows that Love could be, in his mathematics as in his life, truly simply and so truly great.

-from the much longer tribute by E. A. Milne reproduced in its entirety in the link, "Professor A.E.H. Love"

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