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WIMCS wishes to recognize the achievements of world class mathematicians who have had a long association with Wales.

Professor Terry Lyons and the WIMCS Research Committee are delighted that that the following have agreed to become WIMCS Emeritus Professors

Professor David Olive, CBE, FRS

Professor David Olive, CBE, FRS attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh from 1943-1955 before graduating from Edinburgh University with First Class honours in 1958. He earned a BA from Cambridge University before gaining a PhD there under Dr J C Taylor in 1963 whilst being a member of St Johns College. That same year he was awarded a research Fellowship at Churchill College.

He returned to Churchill and Cambridge after a year at the then Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburg. He became an Assistant Lecturer and later Lecturer in DAMTP (the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical physics). After visits to the University of California at Berkeley and CERN in Switzerland he accepted a staff position at CERN which he held from 1971 until 1977. He also spent some time at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

From 1977 to 1992 he worked at Imperial College, London, eventually becoming Professor and head of the Theoretical Physics Group. He spent sabbatical years at the University of Virginia and a second shared between CERN and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987, and in 1989 he was awarded, jointly with Peter Goddard, the Dirac Medal and Prize of the Abdus Salam ICTP in Trieste.

In 1992 he was appointed to a Research Professorship at what is now called Swansea University and helped Ian Halliday, who had also moved from Imperial College at the same time, build up a new research group there.

In 2007 he became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg, Sweden.

He has made substantial visits to the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm, the Newton Institute in Cambridge, the University of Utrecht as Kramers Professor, NORDITA in Copenhagen, Chalmers University in Gothenburg, the University of California at Berkeley as Miller Professor, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and IFT UNESP in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

He has served on committees or panels in many bodies: the NATO ASI Panel, The Royal Society, various Research Councils and editorial boards of Scientific Journals.

He has collaborated on three books: The Analytic S-Matrix, with R J Eden, P V Landshoff and J C Polkinghorne (CUP 1966); Kac-Moody and Virasoro Algebras, edited with Peter Goddard (World Scientific 1988); Duality and Supersymmetric Theories edited with P C West (CUP 1999).

His research achievements include a series of important papers on fermion emission vertices, superstring theory, a series of papers on aspects of the coset construction in conformal field theory, two papers on electromagnetic duality; he has also jointly written papers concerning affine Toda theories and Kac-Moody algebras. Many of these were coauthored with world-leaders in these fileds and have proved to be of seminal importance.

In 2001 Professor Olive received a CBE in the Queen's New Years Honours List in recognition of his services to theoretical physics.

Professor Ken Walters, FRS

Professor Ken Walters was educated at the University of Wales, Swansea, where he graduated with 1st class honours in Applied Mathematics in 1956. He was awarded the MSc degree in 1957 for research into Atmospheric Diffusion and the PhD degree in 1959 for research into Rheology. His supervisor was the late Professor J.G. Oldroyd. Professor Walters was awarded a DSc degree by the University of Wales in 1985.

After a year researching and lecturing in the USA, Ken Walters returned to Wales at Aberystwyth University. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1965, Reader in 1970, and was made Professor in 1973. He is currently a Distinguished Research Professor in the Institute of Mathematics and Physics.

Professor Walters was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991, and, in 1995, he was elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Universite Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France, in 1998.

Between 1974-76, Professor Walters was President of the British Society of Rheology and received a Gold Medal from the Society in 1984. From 1996-2000, he was the (first) President of the European Society of Rheology, and between 2000-2004, he was Chairman of the International Committee on Rheology.

Professor Walters has written 5 books and over 100 research papers. He was Executive Editor of the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics from the launch in 1976 until the publication of Vol. 100 in 2002.

Professor David Williams, FRS 

Professor David Williams is the leading mathematician working in probability in the UK. His work is characterised by an extraordinary intuition concerning the behaviour of stochastic processes, combined with a very wide and deep understanding of mathematics. 

David Williams studied for his D.Phil at Oxford and Durham, being supervised by D.K. Kendall and G.E.H. Reuter. His early research was on Markov chains. For simple Markov chains, a complete description is possible in terms of its ‘Q-matrix’, which givesthe rates at which the chain jumps from one state to another. However, since the work of Kolmogorov in the 1940s it had been known that there were difficulties with the Q-matrix representation for chains with infinite jump rates. In 1975 Williams solved the ‘Q-matrix problem’, and gave necessary and sufficient conditions for a Q-matrix to be associated with a Markov chain. 

William’s expertise in Markov chains soon found application, in completely different areas. With D.W. Stroock and S.R.S. Varadhan, he introduced a powerful duality method for establishing uniqueness of solutions to stochastic differential equations (SDEs). This method is particularly useful for the study of SDEs arising in population genetics, and for these equations the dual is a Markov chain.

Williams work in two other areas of probability shows his ability to develop ideas which would have occurred to no one else. Starting in the late 1960s he discovered a variety of quite unexpected ‘path decompositions’ of Brownian motion; these have proved to be a powerful tool in the study of deep properties of the Brownian trajectory. He initiated the study of Markov processes time changed by an oscillating process, rather than the classical case of an increasing one. There are connections with Wiener-Hopf factorisation, and the theory Williams and his coworkers have developed has applications in the mathematics of insurance.

Williams has played a pivotal role in development of probability in the UK in the last 30 years. He was the first in the UK to appreciate the significance of the work of P.A. Meyer’s ‘Strasbourg school’, and organised an outstanding Durham symposium in 1980 on this work: this was the first place where the ‘Malliavin calculus’ became well known. He is a clear and very lively expositor, and has written two excellent undergraduate textbooks. His two volume work ‘Diffusions, Markov processes and martingales’ (written with L.C.G. Rogers) gives a careful and comprehensive account of this important area of modern probability, and has become a classic.

Williams was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984, and received the Polya prize of the London Mathematical Society in 1994. 

Professor Roger Owen FRS 

Professor Roger Owen received his early education at Llanelli boys Grammar School and University of Wales, Swansea where he graduated with 1st class honours in Civil Engineering in 1963. After completing his M.Sc. at Swansea in 1964, he undertook further research at Northwestern University in the USA, where he was awarded his Ph.D. degree in 1967 for work on the theory of continuously distributed dislocations. Professor Owen was awarded a D.SC. degree by the University of Wales in 1982.

Professor Owen returned to University of Wales Swansea in 1967 to take up an academic post in the Department of Civil Engineering, where under the influence of Professor O. C. Zienkiewicz, he developed an interest in computational methods. From that time, Professor Owen has contributed prominently to the development of computational strategies for plastic deformation problems, both for fundamental material studies and for application to engineering structures and components. He was awarded a Personal Chair in 1983.
 
Over the past two decades, Prof. Owen's work has focused on the development of discrete element methods for particulate modelling and the simulation of multi-fracturing phenomena in materials, where much of his research has been pioneering. This work has extended developments in the continuum modelling of finitely deforming solids by including damage/fracture based failure and introducing material separation on a local basis to permit simulation of the degradation of a continuum into a multi-fractured particulate state. Based upon this methodology, contributions have been made to fundamental understanding in several key application areas. A further topic of recent research has been the coupling of particulate systems and multi-fracturing solids with other physical fields, involving liquids or gases. 
 
Professor Owen was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1996 and awarded an Honorary D.Sc. by the University of Porto, Portugal in 1998. He received the Computational Mechanics Award of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) in 2002 and was awarded the Warner T. Koiter Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2003 for contributions to the field of theoretical and computational solid mechanics. In 2004 he was awarded the Gauss-Newton Medal of IACM and the Gold Medal of the University of Split, Croatia. Professor Owen received the Premium Medal of the Spanish Society for Computational Mechanics (SEMNI) in 2005 and was awarded an Honorary D.Sc. by Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, France in 2007. Professor Owen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009 and became a WIMCS Emeritus Honorary Professor in the same year.
 
Professor Owen is the author of six textbooks, thirty monographs and over three hundred and fifty scientific publications. His involvement in academic research has led to the supervision of over sixty Ph.D. students.
 
Professor Christopher Hooley FRS

Professor Christopher Hooley is one of the UK’s most distinguished Number Theorists.

Professor Hooley graduated from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and went on to complete his PhD there in 1957 entitled ‘Some Theorems in the Additive Theory of Numbers’ under the supervision of Professor A Ingham.  In 1958 Professor Hooley moved to Bristol, and stayed there until 1965 when he was appointed Professor of Pure Mathematics at Durham. In 1967 he became Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cardiff and Head of Pure Mathematics School. From 1988 he was Head of Cardiff School of Mathematics until 1995. He also served for a period as Dean of Science. From 1995 Professor Hooley was Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff until 2008.
 
In 1973 he won the Adams Prize awarded by Cambridge University, and in 1980 the Senior Berwick Prize from the London Maths Society. In 1983, Professor Hooley delivered a 1-hour address at the International Congree of Mathematicians in Warszaw. He has on several occasions been a visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and in 1983 was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
 
Professor Hooley has nearly a hundred publications that have strongly influenced the development of analytic number theory through the past half century. He has made pivotal contributions to the development of sieve theory, some of this work having been exposed in his influential monograph “Applications of Sieve Methods”, published by Cambridge University Press in 1976. He was an early pioneer in analytic number theory of the application of Deligne’s celebrated resolution of the Weil Conjectures to problems in sieve theory and Diophantine equations. This work shifted the course of the subject. Professor Hooley’s work on additive problems, and in applications of the circle method, is unique in its flavour and unparalleled in its sophistication. In particular, his proof in 1988 that non-singular cubic forms in nine variables satisfy the Hasse Principle remains one of the crowning achievements of the use of Fourier analytic methods within number theory. Finally, but by no means least, there is his encyclopaedic series of nineteen papers on the Barban-Davenport-Halberstam theorem.  
 
Among his important papers are:
On nonary cubic forms, Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 386 , pages 32-98, (1988)
On the Barban-Davenport-Halberstam theorem V, VI, and VII, Proc.London Math. Soc. (3), 33 (1976), 535-548; J. London Math. Soc. (2), 13 (1976), 57-64; ibid 16 (1977), 1-8.
On the representation of a number as a sum of four cubes I, and II, Proc. London Math. Soc. (3), 36 (1978), 117-140; J. London Math Soc. (2), 16 (1977), 424-428.
On a new technique and its applications to the theory of numbers, Proc. London Math. Soc. (3), 38 (1979), 115-151.