Person: Atkinson, Frederick Valentine

Frederick Atkinson was an English mathematician who worked in functional analysis and spent most of his career in Nigeria, Australia and Canada.

In the summer of 1929 Atkinson was accepted into St Paul's School in West Kensington.
It was a famous school with an outstanding reputation and Atkinson flourished as a mathematician there.
Atkinson graduated B.A. with First Class Honours in Mathematics in 1937.
Atkinson was interested in languages and spoke Urdu, German, Hungarian and Russian.
Atkinson resigned his Oxford post and accepted the professorship in Ibadan.
Atkinson held the chair at Ibadan for seven years before moving to Australia in 1956 to Canberra College.
We noted above that Atkinson's doctoral dissertation was on the Riemann zeta function.
Atkinson received many honours for his contributions including election to fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (1967), election to fellowship in the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1975), and the McDougall- Brisbane Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for 1974-76 for his paper Limit-n criteria of integral type (1974).
In August 1992, after returning from Europe where he was presented with the Humboldt Prize, Atkinson suffered a massive stroke.

Born 25 January 1916, Pinner, Middlesex, England. Died 13 November 2002, Toronto, Canada.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin England

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive