Kathleen Ollerenshaw

Kathleen Timpson Ollerenshaw, née Timpson ( born October 1, 1912 in Manchester in the suburb of Withington ) is a British mathematician and politician.

Life and work

Ollerenshaw was since the age of eight years virtually deaf (her first hearing aid they received only 37 years ) and was interested in early mathematics. From 1931 she studied at Somerville College, Oxford University mathematics, with a degree in 1933. During the 1930s, she worked while at the same time started a family, part-time at the Shirley Institute, a cotton research institute, where it applied, among other statistical methods. In the 1940s, it established its ties to the university and solved a problem about mesh that you put Kurt Mahler at the University of Manchester. In 1945, she received her doctorate in Oxford at Theo Chaundy (Critical Lattices ) due to the work previously published by it on the grid. At the university, she distinguished herself as a hockey player. Then she taught part-time at the University of Manchester, where she had moved with her husband. She was active in local politics, was from 1956 to 1981 for the Conservative Party in the City Council (as Councillor ) of Manchester, and was 1975/76 Mayor of Manchester. She advised Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s in educational matters. She was one of Hauptinitatoren the Northern Royal College of Music (whose board she is board 1968-1985 ) and became involved in the improvement of mathematics education in England and the education of girls. 1981 to 2003 she was president of her old school, St Leonards School in St Andrews and was a member of the National Council of Woman since 1952.

Ollerenshaw is known for mathematical work in combinatorics, Magic squares (where she also collaborated in 1982 with the astrophysicist Hermann Bondi, with which they solved an old conjecture of Bernard Frénicle de Bessy on the number magic squares of order 4), grids or the cube of Rubik, where she published one of the first general solution methods. Even at the age of 88 years, she published a book about perfectly perfect magic squares in which a long open problem was solved.

1978/79 she was President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA ), whose founding member, she was in 1964. She is also an amateur astronomer, was vice-president and honorary member of the Manchester Astronomical Society. Your telescope they donated, including an observatory in the Lake District ( which they had built, when she was 78 years old ) at Lancaster University.

She was married to her former school friend Colonel Robert Ollerenshaw since 1939, a respected military surgeon and 1978/79 High Sheriff of Manchester region. With him she has two children. Ollerenshaw was made an honorary citizen ( Freeman ) of Manchester. For their involvement in educational matters it was established in 1970 Dame of the British Empire. Peter Maxwell Davies dedicated his Naxos Quartet No.9.

She wrote, among other books on educational issues, an autobiography and a children's book about her experience as mayor of Manchester.

Writings

• Education for Girls, Faber & Faber, London 1961.
• The Girls ' Schools, Faber & Faber, London 1967.
• The Lord Mayor's Party, E. J. Morton, Manchester, 1976 ( children's book with her ​​illustrations )
• First Citizen, Hart-Davis MacGibbon &, London, 1977.
• Manchester Memoirs, Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1981-82.
• With Hermann Bondi: Magic Squares of order four, Scholium International, 1983
• With David Brée: Most perfect magic squares pandiagonal: their construction and enumeration, The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Southend- on-Sea 1998
• To talk of many things, Manchester University Press, 2004 ( autobiography)