Crispin Nash-Williams
Crispin Nash-Williams Alexander Dewdney Dragan Marušič |
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Crispin St John Alvah Nash-Williams
Biography
Nash-Williams was born on 19 December 1932 in
After studying mathematics at the University of Cambridge, earning the title of Senior Wrangler in 1953, he remained at Cambridge for his graduate studies, under the supervision of Shaun Wylie and David Rees. He then continued his education for a year at Princeton University, with Norman Steenrod; all three of Wylie, Rees, and Steenrod are listed as the supervisors of his Ph.D. dissertation. He finished his dissertation in 1958, but before doing so he returned to Britain as an assistant lecturer at the University of Aberdeen.
He remained in Aberdeen for ten years, during which time he was twice promoted. In 1967 he moved to the University of Waterloo and became one of the three faculty members in the newly formed Department of Combinatorics and Optimization there. In 1972, he returned to Aberdeen as Professor of Pure Mathematics, but stayed only briefly, moving to the University of Reading in 1975. There he succeeded Richard Rado, who had earlier been one of his dissertation examiners.
He retired in 1996 and died on 20 January 2001, aged 68, in Ascot, Berkshire, where his brother was rector.[2][1]
Awards and honours
He was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1969. In 1994, the University of Waterloo gave him an honorary doctorate for his contributions to combinatorics. A conference in his honor was held on his retirement in 1996, the proceedings of which were published as a festschrift. The 18th British Combinatorial Conference, held in Sussex in July 2001, was dedicated to his memory.[1]
Contributions
He is known for the Nash-Williams theorem.
Hilton, and infinite graphs." In his first papers Nash-Williams considered the
Welsh writes that his subsequent work defining and characterizing the
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e D. J. A. Welsh, "Crispin St J. A. Nash-Williams (1932–2001)" in Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, Vol. 35, Issue 6, November 2003, Pages 829–844 (subscription required)
- ^ a b Nash-Williams biography from the MacTutor history of mathematics archive.
- ^ Hilton, A. J. W. (2001), "Crispin St J A Nash-Williams", Bull. Inst. Combin. Appl., 33: 11–12.