Louis Napoleon George Filon. 1875-1937

Abstract

Louis Napoleon George Filon was born in France on 22 November 1875. He was the son of Augustin Filon, the French litterateur who was tutor to the Prince Imperial. His parents came to England when he was about three years old and lived at Margate. At this time his father was blind and his mother in delicate health, so that the boy was brought up in a serious atmosphere ; an only child of invalid parents. His father undertook his early education which centred mainly round the Classics. He began Latin and Greek before he was six. His own memories of this time were of regular Latin essays on Roman History and of walks with his father in which Latin was the only permitted language of conversation. His ambition was to be a sailor. He was always drawing pictures of boats at sea, and some good models of ships he made at this time are still in existence. In after life this old ambition showed itself in his keen interest in the theory of navigation and in his one form of relaxation, yachting. At the age of 12 or 13 he went to Herne House, the Reverend Taylor Jones’s school at Margate, and in 1894 he became a student at University College, London. He took his B.A. degree in 1896 with a gold medal for Greek. He had not previously shown any special interest in M athem atics; in fact, by this time his ambition had turned towards painting as a career and he had some skill in that direction. But Mathematics was then part of the curriculum for the B.A., and being brought to it by some measure of compulsion, his special gifts for it soon became apparent. It brought him under the influence of Karl Pearson and Micaiah Hill, two teachers for whom he had an abiding affection and reverence.