Secretariat

Graham Allan

We are very sorry to report that Graham Allan, former Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics, died on 9th August after a period of illness.

Graham was appointed Professor of Pure Mathematics at Leeds in 1970 after brief spells as a lecturer in Newcastle and Cambridge. In the year before he arrived here, he had joined the distinguished roster of mathematicians awarded the Junior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society. Always influential through his research and teaching he had a limpid lecturing style that conveyed mathematical ideas with a minimum of fuss his years at Leeds saw the publication of his ground-breaking work on discontinuous structure-preserving mappings and the beginnings of his pioneering work on radical Banach algebras.

Graham gave a very valuable service to the London Mathematical Society; he was editor of their Proceedings from 1976 to 1981.

Much to the regret of his Leeds colleagues, Graham returned to Churchill College, Cambridge in 1978, as University Lecturer and then Reader in Pure Mathematics. But he had laid the foundations at Leeds of what has become a thriving group in Functional Analysis. Graham spent the remainder of his career in Cambridge, and was Vice-Master of his College from 1990 to 1993. He retired in 2003.

Graham is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and daughters Clare and Juliet. A very kind and thoughtful person, he will be remembered with great affection by his colleagues and his many former research students.