Education
Born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England, Watson attended Winchester School and studied mathematics at Kings College, Cambridge.
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Alister Watson
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He was elected a fellow in 1933 and published two papers during his fellowship, Mathematics and its foundations, Mind, volume 47, pp. 440– 451 (1938) and Principal directions in a gravitational field Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (Series 2) 6.01 (1939): 12-16.
He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain whilst at Cambridge and also became a member and later secretary of the Cambridge Apostles.
In the summer of 1937, he introduced Ludwig Wittgenstein to Alan Turing. He was also well acquainted with John Maynard Keynes and other leading figures of the Cambridge academic life of the time.
Watson and Frank P. Ramsey assisted the economist Piero Sraffa with the mathematics for his book Production of commodities by Means of Commodities. Following Cambridge he joined the British Admiralty as a civilian, working at the Admiralty Signal and Radar Establishment and eventually rose to become head of the Submarine Detection Research Section of the Admiralty Research Laboratory.
After the war he published various papers relating to his research work, including Millimetre Wave Propagation.
Nature 158 (1946): 943 and Absolute Axes and Tidal Forces. Nature 159 (1947): 233-233. He also published two further papers of more general mathematical interest, On the geometry of the wave equation.
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
Volume 43. Number. 04. Cambridge University Press, (1947) and On Mizel"s problem. Journal of the London Mathematical Society 1.1 (1962): 307-308.
He was identified by former Soviet spy Anthony Blunt as having been an ardent Marxist at Cambridge and, also on the basis of other circumstantial evidence, questioned over a period of six weeks by MI5"s interrogator Cecil Shipp in 1965. Whilst he confessed to having met with Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) officials, he denied passing secrets to them.
His security clearance was immediately revoked, and he was removed from his post and transferred to the National Institute of Oceanography, where he worked until retirement.
His publications while working there included Air-sea interaction Science Progress Volume 56, Number. 223 (July 1968), pp. 303–323.
Alister Watson was married twice.
He died in Haslemere, Surrey.
