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BA (Trinity) 1862; Fellow of Trinity

BA 1974. Adams's roommate at St John's.

Bertha Swirles was born in Northampton on 22 May 1903. Like many in Northampton, her father worked in the leather trade (he died when his daughter was only 2). Her mother was a school-teacher and Swirles grew up in an environment in which it was not unusual for the women of the family to be well-educated. In 1915 Swirles went to the newly established Northampton School for Girls, becoming Head Girl, and in 1921 won a Clothworkers' Scholarship to Girton College Cambridge to read Mathematics. She graduated with first class Honours in 1924 and spent the following year studying Part II physics, attending lectures by J.J. Thomson and Rutherford.

Swirles began postgraduate research under R.H. Fowler, holding a Yarrow Fellowship 1925-1927 and Hertha Ayrton Research Fellowship 1927-1928. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 1929. It was an exciting time to be doing research in Cambridge, fellow research students of Fowler were P.A.M. Dirac and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Another research student in the Department was D.R. Hartree and he suggested her first research problem, studying the polarizability of atomic cores. Swirles's and Hartree's careers would cross a number of times and they became firm and lifelong friends. She spent the winter of 1927-1928 in Göttingen, where she worked under Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and met other leading continental workers in the new field of quantum mechanics.

In 1928 Swirles was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Manchester. Here she resumed her contact with Hartree who had also moved there. At Manchester E.A. Milne guided her into research on the absorption of radiation by a gas, working first on a highly degenerate gas then a partially degenerate one, and her work proved significant in the study of stellar structure. This was followed by similar appointments in Bristol (1931-1932) and at Imperial College London (1932-1933) before returning to Manchester in 1933 as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics. She remained at Manchester, again working with Hartree, until 1938 when she returned to Cambridge to take up a Fellowship and Lectureship in Mathematics at Girton. Hartree also returned to Cambridge in 1946, when he was appointed Plummer Professor of Mathematical Physics. Swirles remained at Girton for the rest of her career, serving as Director of Studies in Mathematics and Mechanical Sciences 1949-1969 (and Music, another interest of hers, 1939-1947). The close and friendly contacts with generations of students endured long after they had left Cambridge and sometimes were renewed when children of former students came to study at Girton. Jeffreys served on the Governing Body of the College and served as Vice-Mistress 1966 to 1969. She was appointed Life Fellow of Girton in 1969.

In 1940 Swirles married the eminent scientist Harold Jeffreys. As Bertha Jeffreys she continued to publish papers on quantum theory but her collaboration with her husband led to her most widely known publication, the textbook Methods of Mathematical Physics, which they co-authored. It was first published in 1946 and went through many editions, revisions and reprints, most recently in 1999. Jeffreys's research interests broadened to include seismology in collaboration with her husband, who was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge and knighted in 1953. Theirs was a long and happy marriage until his death at the age of 97 in 1989.

Jeffreys was an influential figure in women's education in Cambridge and in mathematics. She served as President of the Mathematical Association 1969-1970 and was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 1968. She received honorary doctorates from the University of Saskatchewan in 1995 and the Open University in 1996. She died on 18 December 1999.

BA 1813

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.

Jeffreys was one of the small international group of scientists who founded modern geophysics. He applied classical mechanics to investigate the interior of the earth, showing that the core of the Earth was liquid and that there is a substantial difference between the upper and lower mantle. His analyses of travel times of seismic waves with K.E. Bullen became standards of reference. Generations of students learned their geophysics from his book The Earth (first published 1924, sixth edition 1976). Jeffreys was also distinguished as a statistician, developing a theory of probability on Bayesian principles and in a form suitable for use in the physical sciences. His key books in statistics were Scientific Inference (1931) and Theory of Probability (1939). He also made significant contributions early in his career in fluid dynamics and dynamical meteorology and, although primarily an applied mathematician, in pure mathematics. His use and development of mathematical techniques led him to write, jointly with his wife, Bertha Swirles Jeffreys, the treatise Methods of Mathematical Physics (1946), which went through several editions. His first published paper (1910) was on photography and his early interest in natural history is reflected in papers on plant ecology.

Amongst his professional affiliations were the Royal Astronomical Society where he was active in supporting and developing geophysics over many years (President, 1955-1957), the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Committee for Geodesy and Geophyics (chairman of the Seismology SubCommittee), the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (President of the International Association of Seismology 1957-1960) and the International Astronomical Union.

His scientific distinction was recognised by many honours. He was elected FRS in 1925 (Royal Medal 1948, Copley Medal 1960; Bakerian Lecture, 1952); at the time of his death he was Senior Fellow. Others scientific awards included the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society 1937, the Vetlesen Prize of Columbia University 1962 and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society 1964. He was made a knight bachelor in 1953

He married Bertha Swirles in 1940. She was a student at Girton College, Cambridge where she took a Ph.D in atomic physics under the supervision of R.H. Fowler and D.R. Hartree. After periods at Manchester, Bristol and Imperial College London she returned to Girton in 1938 as Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics. She was Director of Studies in Mathematics, 1949-1969 and Vice-Mistress, 1966-1969. Her great support for Jeffreys, especially in his last decades, is very evident in his archives. Her role in preserving and identifying materials is acknowledged below.

Jeffreys died on 18 March 1989.

The Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal.

BA 1677/78, Master of St John's College, 1711-27