Secretariat

Geoffrey James

We are very sorry to have to report that Mr Geoffrey James, former Lecturer in the School of Mathematics (Department of Statistics), died on 13 February 2006.

Born in 1924, Mr James entered St Johns College, Cambridge in 1941 to read Mathematics. On the strength of his examination results in the first two years, he was awarded a College Exhibition in 1942 and a Scholarship in the following year. He was required to suspend his academic studies in 1943 for war service; he spent the next three years working on radar, principally at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern. Returning to St Johns in 1946, he took a First in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos in the following year and in 1948 was awarded the Diploma in Mathematical Statistics with Distinction.

Having been employed for just over a year as a Scientific Officer in the Statistics Section of the Mathematics Division at the National Physical Laboratory, Mr James was appointed as Assistant Lecturer in Statistics in the Department of Mathematics from October 1949. A very able mathematician, Mr James published a number of papers and went on to specialise in the teaching of statistical computation and experimental design. Owing to ill-health, Mr James took early retirement from the University in September 1980 after thirty-one years service. Happily, however, Mr James was able to visit the School of Mathematics on a fairly regular basis until comparatively recently.