Person: Offord, Albert Cyril

Albert Cyril Offord was an English mathematician who was the first professor of mathematics at the London School of Economics.

Offord was brought up in London where he attended Hackney Downs Grammar School.
After graduating from the Grammar School, Offord entered University College, London, where he studied mathematics.
After spending two years in Bangor, Offord was appointed as a lecturer at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1942.
Cyril gave me a very light teaching load, which left me plenty of time for research.
Offord told me about his collaboration with Littlewood.
Offord produced a remarkable generalisation of the results of this paper in The distribution of the values of an entire function whose coefficients are independent random variables (1965).
Returning to our account of Offord's career, he left Newcastle in 1948 when appointed to a chair at Birkbeck College, London.
Cyril attended meetings and continued publishing until the 1990s.
Although Cyril was in frail health and poor sight owing to the loss of an eye because of a tumour in the 1970s, he and Rita greatly enjoyed their retirement, receiving guests in their small north Oxford house, while Cyril indulged in his passions for early music (of which there are many concerts in Oxford), gardening and French literature, benefiting from the proximity of the Maison Française.
Although musical, Cyril had never learned to play an instrument.
Near the beginning of this biography we mentioned that for most of his life Offord had rejected religion but had a conversion late in life.

Born 9 June 1906, London, England. Died 4 June 2000, Oxford, England.

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