|
DEATHS Contents
Peter A. Lees PETER A. LEES Mr Peter Lees, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 20 November 1987, died on 9 January 2004, aged 53. He used mathematics professionally, and maintained a deep interest in, and gained great pleasure from, a variety of branches of mathematics throughout his life. He was well known for his love of Guinness. Professor John Lewis died on 21 January 2004, aged 71. He was born in Swansea and educated at Cardiff High School and the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He then studied in Queen’s University Belfast and was awarded a doctorate in applied mathematics in 1955. From 1956 to 1972, John Lewis was in Oxford where he supervised fifteen DPhil students. In 1972 he moved to Dublin to take up a Senior Professorship in the School of Theoretical Physics at DIAS and served as Director of the School from 1975 until his retirement in 2001. In his doctoral thesis, John Lewis introduced what is now known as the Delgarno-Lewis method in quantum mechanics. Central topics in his work were dissipation in quantum mechanics and Bose-Einstein condensation. From 1988 onwards he did fundamental work on the measurement of internet traffic and in 1999 he founded a company, Corvil Ltd, to exploit this research commercially. The Irish Times described him as a theoretical physicist who revolutionized telecommunication. Professor Robert Kauffman, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 8 May 1987, died on 8 February 2004, aged 62. Robert Kauffman received a PhD from Louisiana State University in 1965 under the direction of A J. Zettl. He taught for a number of years at Western Washington University and then the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He was a frequent visitor to the UK, particularly Cardiff, Birmingham, Sussex and, earlier, Dundee. He was three times an EPSRC Fellow. Kauffman’s research interests were ordinary and partial differential equations, operator theory, differential geometry and number theory. His enthusiasm for teaching on all levels was well known. He was noted for the depth of his mathematical insight.
|