Ian Porteous 9 October 1930 - 30 January 2011

摘要

Ian Porteous died on 30 January 2011, aged 80. He is remembered not only for his academic work but, especially in recent years, for the unflagging commitment he brought to the enrichment of school mathematics through such initiatives as the FunMaths Roadshow (www.funmathsroadshow.com). Following a PhD in algebraic geometry (Chern classes) with Michael Atiyah at Cambridge, Ian moved to Liv-erpool University in 1959. Apart from a year 1961-2 at Columbia University, where he was greatly influenced by the teaching and seminar activity of Serge Lang, Ian spent his whole career at Liverpool, as lecturer and from 1972 as senior lecturer, retiring in 1998. His research interests moved from algebraic geometry through Thom polynomials to the newly flourishing area of singularity theory, where he was among the first to exploit the wonderful new ideas of Rene Thom, applying singularities of functions and mappings to understand in exquisite detail the geometry of smooth surfaces and higher dimensional manifolds. The legendary 'Liverpool Symposium' on Singularity Theory of 1969-70 was a springboard for his as well as other mathematical careers. Ian published many of his ideas in this area in the book Geometric Differentiation, for the intelligence of curves and surfaces (1994 and 2001) and as recently as 2007 (aged 78) he was on the jury of a French PhD thesis in computational geometry and the extraction of ridge curves from real world data. Ian also published a standard work (1995) on Clifford Algebras and, earlier, wrote up the fruits of his year at Columbia and subsequent undergraduate courses in Liver-pool, in Topological Geometry (1969). He was an accomplished translator of books and articles from the Russian including volume one of the famous Singularities of Differentiable Maps by V.I. Arnol'd and others.