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DEATHS Contents Neville Melfi NEVILLE MELFI Dr Neville A. Melfi, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 8 May 1981, died on 23 February 2005. HERBERT JAMES GODWIN Professor Jim Godwin, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 15 December 1949, died on the 4 April 2005. Born in Wiltshire, he was the only child of a farmer. At the age of 9 he won a scholarship to Bristol Grammar School. A further scholarship took him to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1941. He obtained a first class in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos. During the war he was drafted into the Ministry of Supply, working on statistical and mathematical problems. It was during this period that he met his future wife Sheila Mayer, and they married in 1947. When the war ended he was appointed to a lectureship in Mathematics at University College, Swansea. In 1968 Professor Godwin established a new Department of Statistics and Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. His main research area was in a branch of number theory called Aliquot Sequences. These depend on the sum of the positive divisors of a number, excluding the number itself: the process is iterated to form a sequence. It is an open question whether these sequences always cycle, or end in one. He published his first paper as an undergraduate and continued active research until his death this year. He published over 80 papers. After a long and happy marriage his wife Shiela died in 2003. He is survived by his son William and his daughter Freda. Professor Godwin was extremely courteous and well liked. To sum up his life in a single phrase, he was a scholar and a gentleman. Alan R. Davies
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