At the age of 35 he left Porth to matriculate at St. John's College, Cambridge, for three years as a foundation scholar; reading the Natural Science Tripos.
[1] In 1912 he moved to London and became principal of the West Ham Technical Institute, a post he held until 1918.
[3] Airey became a member of the Mathematical Tables Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1911 and was its secretary from 1916 to 1929.
[3] When at Cambridge he showed an interest in computation in general, particularly in Bessel and the hypergeometric functions.
According to Dr Comrie, the British Association's tables of Emden's function[iii] were calculated by methods suggested by Airey.
[1] He died aged 69 on 16 September 1937 at his home of Llwynon, Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales, after an illness of six months.
[2] His obituaries appeared in Nature[2] and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.