Sir Harold Jeffreys

Harold Jeffreys was born on 22 April 1891 at Fatfield, a colliery village in County Durham where his father was headmaster of the village school. He received his school education at Fatfield and Rutherford College, Newcastle, proceeding in 1907 to Armstrong College, Newcastle, the forerunner of Newcastle University but then part of Durham University. Here he took courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry and geology, graduating in June 1910 with first class marks and a distinction in mathematics. Encouraged by his mathematics teacher C.M. Jessop he applied for a Cambridge award and in December 1909 he was elected to an entrance scholarship at St John's College as one of four mathematics scholars. Although there were financial difficulties and the problem of adjusting to a standard of mathematics much harder than that of Armstrong College, his performance in the third year of the Mathematical Tripos (1913) was a distinguished one. He was awarded one of the two Hughes Prizes for undergraduates who had done best in the college in any subject, his college scholarship was extended for a fourth year, and he began research.

Jeffreys was elected a fellow of St John's College in November 1914 and remained one for the rest of his life. He held the Isaac Newton Studentship, 1914-1917, worked part-time at the Cavendish Laboratory on war-time problems 1915-1917, moving to the Meteorological Office in London in 1917 where he first employed his mathematical skills to 'certain difficult questions in gunnery which came to us from the services' and then to 'problems of the atmosphere'. In 1922 he returned to Cambridge as College lecturer in mathematics and was appointed to a university lectureship in 1926. He was Reader in Geophysics in 1931 and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in 1946, retiring in 1958.

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