Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman FRS
The great
mathematician and inspiring teacher Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman
FRS died on 13 February 2016 at the age of 91.
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Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman
Portrait by Peter Edwards, 2007
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Professor Zeeman conducted the marvellous Inner
Circle Seminar No. 169, Mathematics and Human Action:
Reducing the arbitrariness of the metaphor in the human
sciences, on 6
November 2011 at Durrants Hotel, London. He convincingly showed that such
qualitative mathematical disciplines as catastrophe theory can illuminate the
existential phenomenology of human action (though he did not, and would not
have, put it in quite these words). He also exposed, by comparison, what he characterised as ‘gibberish’ – pseudo-science and pseudo-mathematics – in the social sciences and psychotherapy theory, in particular in Lacan. He will surely be mourned by all who
were at that seminar, as well as by thousands of his colleagues and
students round the world. He said his interests were ‘people and mathematics’,
in that order, when he supervised me in Cambridge between 1959 and 1961; and all
my meetings with him over the next half-century confirmed this. He was a true
mathematician but above all a true mensch.
See the
Guardian obituary by his colleague Ian Stewart
at:
The
Daily Telegraph also had a good obituary.
Anthony Stadlen (20 March 2016)
Anthony Stadlen (20 March 2016)
... thinking again of Zeeman’s inspiring seminar, if it wasn’t for characters like him academia would be irredeemable.
Andy Salt, philosophy student (27 February 2012)
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