Alfred Lodge


Professor Alfred Lodge MA, was an English mathematician, author, and the first president of The Mathematical Association.
Alfred Lodge was born in 1854 at Penkhull, Staffordshire, one of nine children to Oliver Lodge and Grace, née Heath. His siblings included physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and historians Sir Richard Lodge and Eleanor Constance Lodge. He attended Horncastle Grammar School, afterwards studying at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1876 he became a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and in 1884 joined the Royal Indian Engineering College at Egham, there becoming a professor of pure mathematics, succeeding Joseph Wolstenholme in 1889. From 1904 until after the First World War he was a master at Charterhouse School. In 1897 Lodge became the first president of The Mathematical Association after its name change from The Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching.
Lodge was at times associated with his brother Oliver Lodge’s preoccupation with psychic phenomena, although stating that his interest only lay where this seemed to apply to mathematics.
Alfred Lodge died at Oxford on 1 December 1937. He was father of two sons, Charles and Christopher.

Selected publications