21 Facts About Christopher Zeeman

Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman FRS, was a British mathematician, known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory.

Christopher Zeeman is known among the wider scientific public for his contribution to, and spreading awareness of catastrophe theory, which was due initially to another topologist, Rene Thom, and for his Christmas lectures about mathematics on television in 1978.

Christopher Zeeman was especially active in encouraging the application of mathematics, and catastrophe theory in particular, to biology and behavioural sciences.

Christopher Zeeman was born in Japan to a Danish father, Christian Christopher Zeeman, and a British mother.

Christopher Zeeman studied mathematics at Christ's College, Cambridge, but had forgotten much of his school mathematics while serving in the Air Force.

Christopher Zeeman received an MA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and became a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College where he tutored David Fowler and John Horton Conway.

Christopher Zeeman is one of the founders of engulfing theory in piecewise linear topology and is credited with working out the engulfing theorem, which can be used to prove the piecewise linear version of the Poincare conjecture for all dimensions above four.

Christopher Zeeman was able to trade four academic appointments for funding that enabled PhD students to give undergraduate supervision in groups of two for the first two years, in a manner similar to the tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge.

Christopher Zeeman remained at Warwick until 1988, but from 1966 to 1967 he was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, after which his research turned to dynamical systems, inspired by many of the world leaders in this field, including Stephen Smale and Rene Thom, who both spent time at Warwick.

In 1963, Christopher Zeeman showed that causality in special relativity expressed by the preservation of partial ordering is given exactly and only by the Lorentz transforms.

Christopher Zeeman subsequently spent a sabbatical with Thom at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris, where he became interested in catastrophe theory.

In 1974 Christopher Zeeman gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver, about applications of catastrophe theory.

Christopher Zeeman was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975, and was awarded the Society's Faraday Medal in 1988.

Christopher Zeeman was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize of the Society in 1982.

Christopher Zeeman was the Society's first Forder lecturer, involving a lecture tour in New Zealand, in 1987.

In 1978, Christopher Zeeman gave the televised series of Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution.

Christopher Zeeman received a knighthood in the 1991 Birthday Honours for "mathematical excellence and service to British mathematics and mathematics education".

Christopher Zeeman was invited to become President of The Mathematical Association in 2003 and based his book Three-dimensional Theorems for Schools on his 2004 Presidential Address.

On Friday 6 May 2005, the University of Warwick's new Mathematics and Statistics building was named the Christopher Zeeman Building in his honour.

Christopher Zeeman became an Honorary Member of The Mathematical Association in 2006.

The medal is awarded triennially, and Christopher Zeeman was the second-ever recipient of the award.