Kathleen Ollerenshaw

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Dame Kathleen Timpson Ollerenshaw , DBE , née Kathleen Mary Timpson (born October 1, 1912 in Manchester in the suburb of Withington, † August 10, 2014 in Didsbury ), was a British mathematician and politician .

Kathleen Ollerenshaw 2007

life and work

Ollerenshaw, who had been practically deaf since the age of eight (she didn't get her first hearing aid until she was 37), took an early interest in math. From 1931 she studied mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford University , graduating in 1933.

In the 1930s, while at the same time starting a family, she worked part-time at the Shirley Institute, a cotton research institute, where she used statistical methods, among other things . In the 1940s she made contact with the university again and solved a problem about grids that Kurt Mahler posed to her at the University of Manchester . In 1945 she received her doctorate in Oxford under Theo Chaundy (Critical Lattices) on the basis of the work previously published by her on grids. At the university she also excelled as a hockey player. She then taught part-time at the University of Manchester, where she had moved with her husband.

She was involved in local politics , was from 1956 to 1981 for the Conservative Party on the City Council (as Councilor ) of Manchester, and was Mayor of Manchester from 1975/76 . She advised Margaret Thatcher on parenting issues in the 1980s. She was a key initiator of the Northern Royal College of Music (of which she chaired the board of directors from 1968 to 1985) and was involved in improving math teaching in England and the schooling of girls. From 1981 to 2003 she was president of her old school, St. Leonards School in St Andrews , and was a member of the National Council of Woman since 1952.

Ollerenshaw is known for mathematical work in combinatorics , on magic squares (where she also worked in 1982 with the astrophysicist Hermann Bondi , with whom she solved an old conjecture by Bernard Frénicle de Bessy about the number of magic squares of the order 4), grids or the Rubik's Cube , for whom she published one of the first general solution methods. At the age of 86, she published a book about perfectly perfect magic squares , in which a long-standing problem was solved.

In 1978/79 she was President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), of which she was a founding member in 1964. She was also an amateur astronomer and was Vice President and Honorary Fellow of the Manchester Astronomical Society. She donated her telescope and an observatory in the Lake District (which she had built when she was 78 years old) to Lancaster University .

She had been married to her former school friend Robert Ollerenshaw since 1939, a respected military surgeon (last rank: Colonel) and High Sheriff of the Manchester area in 1978/79. She had two children with him. Ollerenshaw became a Freeman of Manchester. For her involvement in educational issues, she was raised to the British nobility in 1970 as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire . Peter Maxwell Davies dedicated his Naxos Quartet No. 9 to her .

She has written books on parenting issues, an autobiography, and a children's book about her experiences as Mayor of Manchester , among other things .

Fonts

  • Education for Girls , Faber & Faber, London 1961.
  • The Girls' Schools , Faber & Faber, London 1967.
  • The Lord Mayor's Party , EJ Morton, Manchester 1976 (children's book with their illustrations)
  • First Citizen , Hart-Davis & MacGibbon, London, 1977.
  • Manchester Memoirs , Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1981-82.
  • with Hermann Bondi : Magic Squares of order four , Scholium International, 1983
  • with David Brée: Most perfect pandiagonal magic squares: their construction and enumeration , The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Southend-on-Sea 1998
  • To talk of many things , Manchester University Press, 2004 (autobiography)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw former Lord Mayor of Manchester dies aged 101
  2. ↑ The Hungarian magic cube , Bull. Inst. Math. Appl., Volume 16, 1980, No. 4, pp. 86-92
  3. ↑ Portrait on BBC Radio 4, July 8, 2004
personal data
SURNAME Ollerenshaw, Kathleen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ollerenshaw, Kathleen Timpson; Timpson, Kathleen (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician and politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Manchester
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 2014
Place of death Didsbury