Person: Waller, Derek Arthur
Derek Waller was an English mathematician who worked in category theory, algebra and graph theory.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- This town, about 20 km from Sheffield and 16 km from Rotherham, had a population of about 7,500 when Waller was born there.
- Its first headmaster was Gerald Rush and he was still the headmaster when Waller studied there.
- He taught Waller during his undergraduate years at Liverpool and, although Waller did not shine in the B.Sc. degree examinations, nevertheless Walker was convinced that Waller had the potential to produce good research work in mathematics.
- Walker suggested that Brown might take Waller on as his first Ph.D. student and so, after the award of his B.Sc., Waller began research at Liverpool for his doctorate.
- In 1965, after completing three years as a research student, Waller was appointed to the University College of Swansea (since 2007 it has adopted the name Swansea University).
- Waller's first appointment was as an assistant lecturer but in 1967 he was promoted to lecturer.
- During his two years as an assistant lecturer, Waller continued to work on his Ph.D. thesis The Topology of Homotopy Bundles which he submitted to the University of Liverpool in June 1967.
- Waller's talk at the British Combinatorial Conferences held in Aberystwyth in 1973 was written up as Eigenvalues of graphs and operations and published in the conference proceedings.
- In the above quote by Norman Biggs, there is a reference to Waller lecturing in Rome.
- Derek Waller died from leukaemia in June 1978, four days after his 37th birthday.
- Alan Thomas had published the paper Embeddings of covering projections of graphs (1980) coauthored with Derek Waller and Francis W Clarke.
Born 19 June 1941, Dinnington, near Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Died 23 June 1978, Swansea, Wales.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin England
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @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
