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Person: Everitt, Norrie

Norrie Everitt was an English mathematician who spent most of his career at Dundee and Birmingham. He was an expert in the field of spectral analysis and differential equations.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• He used the name W N Everitt on most of his publications but he has a 1984 paper with his name given as Willian N Everitt although certainly from the mid 1960s onwards he was known by his friends and colleagues in Dundee as Norrie.
• From 1991 onwards he has papers with his name given as W Norrie Everitt.
• The authors of this article knew him as Norrie and we will use that name throughout this biography.
• Norrie Everitt's parents were Charles Ernest Everitt, a shipping transport director born 6 May 1895, and Elizabeth Cloudsley Ross, born 10 January 1895.
• Norrie Everitt was educated at Kings Norton Grammar School in Birmingham.
• After graduating from Kings Norton Grammar School, Everitt matriculated at the University of Birmingham where he studied electrical engineering.
• After the award of his M.A., Everitt continued to undertake research at Balliol College for his doctorate advised by Edward Charles Titchmarsh.
• Everitt was awarded a DPhil in 1955 for his thesis Eigenfunction Expansions Associated with Fourth-Order Differential Equations.
• This paper, submitted in December 1956, was not Everitt's first since he had submitted Inequalities for Gram determinants (1957) in October 1956.
• Before the award of his D.Phil., Everitt had been appointed to the Royal Military College of Science in Shrivenham in 1954.
• They had two sons, Charles Everitt (born 7 January 1956) and Timothy Everitt (born 1957).
• Everitt published papers such as Some properties of Gram matrices and determinants (1958), A note on positive definite matrices (1958), Integrable-square solutions of ordinary differential equations (1959), On a generalization of Bessel functions and a resulting class of Fourier kernels (1959), On the Hölder inequality (1961), Self-adjoint boundary value problems on finite intervals (1962), Integrable-square solutions of ordinary differential equations.
• This impressive list of high quality papers led to Everitt being appointed to the Baxter Chair of Mathematics, Queen's College, Dundee, in 1962, taking up the post in the following year.
• When Everitt was appointed to Queen's College, Dundee, it was still a college of the University of St Andrews, and it remained as such until 1 August 1967 when the University of Dundee received its royal charter.
• Everitt delivered his inaugural lecture in 1963, entitled 'The Spell of Mathematics'.
• Before continuing with our biography of Norrie Everitt, let us give brief details of his sons.
• Charles Everitt was educated at Dundee High School, Edinburgh University and Balliol College Oxford.
• Timothy Everitt was awarded a B.Sc. from the University of Aberdeen in 1978, worked as an engineer for BP from 1989 to 1993, and is now a consultant for Cults Telecom Services.
• For nearly 20 years Everitt was the Baxter Professor of Mathematics in Dundee.
• The first, held in Dundee from 28 to 31 March 1972, had Proceedings published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics series with Norrie Everitt and Brian Sleeman as editors.
• The success of this conference led to it becoming the first in a series, and in 1978 the fifth 'Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations Conference' was held in Dundee with Everitt as the sole editor of the Proceedings.
• A number of his colleagues, including David Colton, W N Everitt, R J Knops, A G Mackie, and G F Roach, met in Edinburgh early in 1977 in order to make provisional arrangements for the Conference programme.
• The seventh conference in the series took place in Dundee in March/April 1982, and later that year Everitt left Dundee to take up an appointment at the University of Birmingham as Mason Chair and Head of the Department of Mathematics.
• In Birmingham, Everitt continued to organise conferences and edit proceedings.
• A London Mathematical Society international conference with the same title, and this book as its theme, was held at Birmingham University in the summer of 1987, organised by Professor Norrie Everitt.
• Norrie was a keen student of opera, British history, literature, poetry, trees, films, railroad history, the American West, and was an excellent after-dinner speaker.
• Norrie began writing his well-prepared lectures in the upper left-hand corner of the board and ended his talk, on time, with his customary period (.) in the lower right-hand corner.
• As technology evolved, Norrie adapted and skilfully delivered Beamer-type presentations.
• Everitt died in 2011, a month after his 87th birthday.
• The conference "Spectral analysis and differential equations, A memorial meeting to mark the life and work of Professor W N Everitt" was held at the University of Cardiff on the 15-17 May 2014.

Born 10 June 1924, Birmingham, England. Died 17 July 2011, Birmingham, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

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