Person: Walker (3), Geoffrey
Geoffrey Walker studied at Oxford and Edinburgh. He taught at Imperial College London, Liverpool and Sheffield before returning to Liverpool as Professor of Pure Mathematics. He worked on Differential Geometry, Relativity and Cosmology.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Geoffrey Walker attended Watford Grammar School and from there, having won a mathematics scholarship in his final year, he entered Balliol College, Oxford.
- After submitting his Ph.D. thesis to Edinburgh, Walker was examined by Eddington.
- In 1952, after five years in Sheffield, Walker was to return to Liverpool University, this time as Professor of Pure Mathematics.
- Walker worked on geometry, in particular differential geometry, relativity, and cosmology.
- This is concerned with the restrictions imposed on a Riemannian nnn-space by the existence of a locally symmetric vector field and it continues work begun by Walker in a paper on possible orientation of galaxies published early in his career in 1940.
- In 1962 Walker published Harmonic Spaces, a joint work with H S Ruse and T J Willmore.
- In 1975 he published Introduction to geometrical cosmology a survey which arose out of a course that Walker gave at the University of Arizona.
- It is entirely concerned with what might be called the classical theory, leading up to and discussing the standard model with the Robertson-Walker metric; it contains no new results though some of the methods may not have appeared in print.
- The Robertson-Walker metric which Walker mentions in this quotation arose from joint work which he did with his colleague H P Robertson in the late 1930s.
- Walker was elected both a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a fellow of the Royal Society of London.
- The Royal Society of Edinburgh honoured Walker by awarding him their Keith Medal in 1950.
Born 17 July 1909, Watford, Hertfordshire, England. Died 31 March 2001, Chichester, Sussex,England.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin England
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
