Ian Robertson Porteous

Ian Robertson Porteous (born October 9, 1930 in Crossgates, Fife, † January 30, 2011 in Liverpool ) was a Scottish mathematician.

Porteous was the son of theologian Norman Walker Porteous (1898-2003), went to school in Edinburgh and studied mathematics at the University of Edinburgh with a first degree in 1952. After military service, he continued his studies at the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) continued and received his doctorate with William Vallance Douglas Hodge in 1961 (with Michael Atiyah taking over the actual supervision of the dissertation ). The dissertation was in the field of algebraic geometry and dealt with the behavior of Chern classes in dilation. In 1959 he became a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool and in 1972 Senior Lecturer. He dealt with differential geometry and singularity theory (participation in the Liverpool Singularities Symposia, organized by Terry Wall , applications of the so-called catastrophe theory by René Thom ) and wrote the innovative textbook Topological Geometry (1969). It was influenced by similar textbooks from the Bourbaki school ( Jean Dieudonné ) and dealt with linear algebra, quaternions, Lie groups, Clifford algebras, differential calculus in real and complex Euclidean and Banach spaces, and differential calculus on manifolds. In 1998 he retired.

1961/62 he was visiting scholar at Columbia University , where Serge Lang influenced him.

He also dealt with mathematics education for students in his program Mathematical Education on Merseyside (MEM), where he also organized successful mathematics competitions with Peter Giblin from 1978. MEM was founded in 1977 and became a charity in 1986. Porteous was MEM President from 1985 until his death. He also translated mathematical works from Russian, especially on singularity theory, such as the first volume by Wladimir Arnold , Gusein-Zade and Varchenko Singularities of Differentiable Maps (Birkhäuser).

1974 to 1978 he was for the Liberals on Liverpool City Council. His hobby was mountain hiking.

Fonts

• Topological Geometry, Van Nostrand 1969, 2nd edition Cambridge University Press 1981
• The normal singularities of a submanifold, Journal of Differential Geometry, Volume 5, 1971, pp. 543-564
• Clifford Algebras and the Classical Groups, Cambridge University Press 1995
• Geometric Differentiation for the intelligence of curves and surfaces, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 2nd edition 2001
• Geometric differentiation - a Thomist view of differential geometry, in CTC Wall (ed.), Singularities Symposium II, Liverpool 1969/70, Springer, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 209, 1971, pp. 122–127

Web links

• Obituary by Peter Giblin 2011 (pdf)