Mathematician and statistician Alexander Craig Aitken was born on 1 April 1895, in Dunedin, New Zealand. He was educated at Otago Boys' High School and then at the University of Otago from 1913, enrolling in mathematics, French and Latin, though his studies were interrupted by War. During the First World War he served in the Middle East and in France, participating in the latter stages of the Gallipoli Campaign, and then in the field in northern France where he was wounded in the Battle of the Somme. He was invalided home to New Zealand in 1917.

Aitken resumed his studies in 1918, and in 1920 he married Winifred Betts, a student of botany who later became the first female lecturer at the University of Otago. Aitken himslef became an assistant to Professor R.J.T. Bell (1876-1963) at Otago. He was awarded a University of New Zealand scholarship to study under Professor E.T. Whittaker (1873-1956) at Edinburgh University and he left New Zealand in July 1923, with Winifred joining him at the conclusion of the academic year.

In 1925, Aitken was appointed to the staff at Edinburgh as Lecturer in Actuarial Mathematics, and that same year he completed his thesis on the graduation of observational data. This was done at the expense of a severe breakdown in 1927 however. In 1936, he was promoted to Reader in Statistics following his being made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was invited to take up the chair of Pure Mathematics on Whittaker's retirement in 1948.

Aitken owned a legendary memory and calculative power, and he could recite the first 700 or so decimal places of 'Pi'. He published on such topics as symmetric groups, invariants, the solution of linear and polynomial equations, eigenvalue problems, and computational algorithms. His published work includes: jointly with H. W. Turnbull, The Theory of Canonical Matrices (1932); with D.E. Rutherford, editor of a series of University Mathematical Texts; the paper Determinants and Matrices (1939); the paper Statistical Mathematics (1939); The case against decimalisation (1962); and, the memoir Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman (1963).

Professor Alexander Craig Aitken died on 3 November 1967.