Robert Grant Aitken

Did You Know?

• Aitken was partly deaf and used a hearing aid.
• His son Robert Thomas Aitken was an anthropologist who studied Pacific island cultures.
• His granddaughter Marjorie J. Vold was a noted chemist specializing in colloids.

Career

Aitken began his career as a mathematics instructor in Livermore, California, from 1887 to 1891. After receiving his M.A. from Williams College in 1892, he became a professor of mathematics at the College of the Pacific. In 1895 he was offered an assistant astronomer position at Lick Observatory. There he started a systematic study of double stars, measuring their positions and calculating their orbits. From 1899, he collaborated with W. J. Hussey to create a large catalog of such stars, published in Lick Observatory bulletins. By 1915 he had discovered roughly 3,100 new binary stars, in addition to the 1,300 discovered by Hussey. The results were published in 1932 as the New General Catalogue of Double Stars Within 120° of the North Pole, whose orbit information enabled astronomers to calculate stellar mass statistics for many stars. For this work he received the Bruce Medal in 1926. Aitken also measured positions and computed orbits for comets and natural satellites. In 1908 he joined an eclipse expedition to Flint Island. His book Binary Stars was published in 1918, with a second edition in 1935. He served as president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1899 and 1915, and was an editor of its Publications from 1898 to 1942. In 1932 he delivered the Darwin Lecture before the Royal Astronomical Society, where he was an associate member. From 1918 to 1928 he chaired the double star committee for the International Astronomical Union.