Person: Clunie, James Gourlay
James Clunie was a Scottish-born mathematician who worked in complex analysis.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- One of the reasons that the headmaster was able to say that they had maintained their high standards was the fact that several of the former pupils, including Clunie, were by this time being highly successful at university.
- Clunie graduated from Madras College in 1945 having been awarded the Sir William Robertson Medal as Dux in Science and the Tullis Medal as Dux in Mathematics.
- Applied mathematics had been built up by Dan Rutherford who was also teaching in the department during Clunie's four years as an undergraduate.
- Clunie graduated with a First Class Honours B.Sc. in Mathematics in 1949 and for his outstanding performance he was awarded the Carstairs Prize.
- Clunie chose the optional courses Statistics and Special Functions.
- Although Clunie's performance had been outstanding in all the courses he took, he was not the best student in his year; this distinction went to Iain Adamson.
- After graduating, Clunie went to Aberdeen to undertake research at the University of Aberdeen where his thesis advisor was Archibald James Macintyre.
- After the award of his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, Clunie was appointed as a lecturer in mathematics at the University College of North Staffordshire, which was in Keele, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, and became Keele University in 1961.
- Clunie did not remain at the University College of North Staffordshire until it became Keele University for, in 1956, he moved to London.
- Clunie was one of Hayman's first appointments to Imperial College.
- His papers included one on the coefficients of univalent functions, published in Annals of Mathematics, that led to the introduction of the so-called 'Clunie constant'; another in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society that contains a result now known as 'Clunie's lemma'; and a joint paper in Crelle's Journal with Professor J Milne Anderson and Professor Christian Pommerenke that established the theory of so-called Bloch functions.
- Let us give a little more detail to the highlights of Clunie's research which are indicated in this quote.
- The paper in which he introduced the 'Clunie constant' was On schlicht functions (1959) but he continued the investigation in numerous later papers including On meromorphic schlicht functions (1959) and On the coefficients of univalent functions (1974).
- Pommerenke had studied at the University of Göttingen where he habilitated but he had spent the years 1965-67 at Imperial College, London, where he worked closely with Clunie.
- Returning to the quote above, 'Clunie's lemma' appeared in his paper On integral and meromorphic functions (1962).
- Clunie's co-authors on this paper were Christian Pommerenke and J Milne Anderson.
- James Milne Anderson (born 1938) was a Ph.D. student of Clunie's at Imperial College and was awarded his doctorate for his thesis The Behaviour of Integral and Subharmonic Functions in 1963.
- Clunie spent the academic year 1959-60 in the United States.
- At the age of 39, Clunie was promoted to a professorship at Imperial College in 1964.
- He could only recall one occasion when the consumption was even higher, and that was a conference organized by Professor Clunie in 1979.
Born 26 October 1926, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland. Died 5 March 2013, York, England.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Scotland
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
