Life
Hyman Levy was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Scotland in 1889. He was the third oldest of eight children of Minna Cohen and Marcus Levy. His father was a picture-framer and occasional art dealer in Edinburgh. The family lived at 70 Bristo Street in Edinburgh's South Side.
Levy attended George Heriot's School a short distance from his family home, and was named the school Dux in 1907. He studied mathematics at Edinburgh University. His leftist politics were evident early when he declined a chance for further study at Cambridge University—on account of what he considered its complicity in Britain's class system—and instead chose to pursue mathematical research at the University of Göttingen in Germany. At the outbreak of World War I, Levy returned to Britain. In 1916 he joined the Royal Flying Corps. It is unclear if he saw active service, but the experience inspired an interest in aerodynamics.
In 1916 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Cargill Gilston Knott, Edmund Taylor Whittaker, James Robert Milne and George Alexander Carse.
In 1918 he married Marion Aitken Fraser, a devout Presbyterian, which led to a rupture with his family who disapproved of the interfaith marriage. The couple had a daughter and two sons.
Levy researched aeronautics at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). He published papers and books on the subject, including Aeronautics in Theory and Experiment (1918), which was called "perhaps the earliest text covering, at advanced level, the whole theory of aeroplane design and operation." After leaving NPL, he became a professor of mathematics at the Royal College of Science, Imperial College London, where he later served as head of the mathematics department, and subsequently became dean of the Royal College itself.
Levy's main areas of mathematical specialization were in numerical methods, numerical solutions of differential equations, finite difference equations and statistics. Among his important books were Numerical Studies in Differential Equations (1934), Elements of Probability (1936), and Finite Difference Equations (1959). He also made contributions to number theory, including a 1963 paper comparing Lemoine's conjecture to Goldbach's weak conjecture.
Levy was in the Labour Party from 1920 to 1931. He then joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and was a loyal member for 25 years. In 1956 he travelled to the Soviet Union and was appalled by what he regarded as the mistreatment of Russian-Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals. He published a scathing article on the subject in January 1957, and then followed that with a book, Jews and the National Question. He was condemned by CPGB leadership for his "departure from Marxism", culminating in his expulsion from the Party in 1958.
Hyman Levy died in Wimbledon, London on 27 February 1975, one day before his 86th birthday.
