Abstract
DR. ARTHUR GEOFFREY WALKER has been appointed to the chair of mathematics in the University of Sheffield, in succession to the late Prof. P. J. Daniell. Dr. Walker has been a member of the Department of Pure Mathematics at Liverpool for the past ten years. He is thirty-seven years old and was educated at Watford Grammar School and at Balliol College, Oxford. On taking his degree in 1931, he went to Edinburgh and commenced research under Prof, (now Sir) Edmund Whittaker. This was a time of exceptional activity at Edinburgh. Prof. Whittaker was mainly interested in relativity and differential geometry, and his staff, which in the years 1927-32 included E. T. Copson, J. M. Whittaker, J. G. Semple, H. S. Ruse, W. H. McCrea and A. Oppenheim, all of whom have gone on to professorial chairs, for the most part followed his lead. To Walker, who had gained distinction in differential geometry in the Final Honours School at Oxford, the subject of Prof. Whittaker's lectures was particularly congenial, and he wrote several papers, the first of a long series on differential geometry, relativity and cosmology. In 1933 he returned to Oxford to take up a Harmsworth Research Scholarship at Merton College, to which he had been elected in the previous year. He worked with Prof. E. A. Milne on kinematical relativity, then at the beginning of its stimulating and controversial career. This subject has continued to engage Dr. Walker's attention ever since. He is a supporter of Milne's general point of view, but has developed a more general theory, which seems capable of accounting both for cosmological effects and for phenomena due to intense local gravitational fields such as that of the sun. Certain functional equations present themselves in this work, and he has investigated them from the point of view of pure mathematics in collaboration with his Liverpool colleagues F. W. Bradley, now professor of mathematics at the University of Alexandria, and Miss Joyce Batty.
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Mathematics at Sheffield : Prof. A. G. Walker. Nature 159, 89 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159089a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159089a0