Whitworth, William Allen

Person

Whitworth, William Allen

1840 – 1905

William Allen Whitworth was a mathematician and Church of England clergyman. He was born in Runcorn on 1 February 1840. He was the eldest son in the family of four sons and two daughters of William Whitworth and his wife, Susanna Coyne.
He was educated at Sandicroft School, Northwich from 1851-57 and then at St John's College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1858. In 1862 he graduated BA as sixteenth wrangler, he obtained his MA in 1865, and he was fellow of St. John’s College from 1867 to 1884. He was successively chief mathematics master at Portarlington School and Rossall School and professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Liverpool.
Whilst he was an undergraduate he was principal editor, along with Charles Taylor and others, of the Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin Messenger of Mathematics, which was started at Cambridge in November 1861. Whitworth remained one of the editors until 1880, and was a frequent contributor. Whitworth's best-known mathematical work, Choice and Chance, an Elementary Treatise on Permutations, Combinations and Probability (1867), developed from lectures delivered to women at Queen's College, Liverpool, in 1866. A model of clear and simple exposition, it presented a very ample collection of problems on probability and kindred subjects.
Whitworth was ordained deacon in 1865 and priest in 1866, and won high repute in his clerical career. He was the curate at St Anne's, Birkenhead (1865), and of St Luke's, Liverpool (1866–70), and perpetual curate of Christ Church, Liverpool (1870–75). He was vicar of St John the Evangelist, Hammersmith (1875–86), and from November 1886 until his death, vicar of All Saints, Marylebone. He also held a college living from 1885 in the diocese of Bangor, and was in the 1891–2 commissary of the South African diocese of Bloemfontein. Whitworth was select preacher at Cambridge five times and the Hulsean lecturer there in 1903–4. He was made a prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral in 1900. On 10 June 1885 he married Sarah Louisa Elwes. The couple had four sons, all graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Whitworth, though he had been brought up an evangelical, was influenced at Cambridge by the scholarship of J. B. Lightfoot and B. F. Westcott, and he later studied the German rationalizing school of theology. He was considered to be a good and original preacher. His sympathies lay mainly with the high-church party, and in 1875 he joined the English Church Union. His ecclesiastical publications included an almanac of dates of Easter (1882), a description of All Saints Church, Margaret Street (1891); Worship in the Christian Church (1899), and two posthumous volumes of sermons (1906, 1908).
Whitworth died on 12 March 1905 at Home Hospital, Fitzroy Square, London after a serious operation on 28 February. He was buried at on 16 March in ground belonging to St Alban the Martyr, Holborn. There is a slab to his memory in the floor of All Saints Church, Margaret Street.

D. J. Owen (revised by Alan Yoshioka), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36883?rskey=gfIvG2&result=1