Person: Woods, Leslie Colin

Leslie Woods was a New Zealand mathematician who worked in fluid mechanics, particularly in the area of plasmas.

His name was not Woods at this stage, that was a name he chose later in life, but rather he was Leslie Woodhead.
It was not until he was fourteen years old when he began attending Brixton Road Primary School that Leslie wore shoes for the first time.
Leslie then began the engineering course at Auckland University College.
Woods then did something that few others have ever done - after the award of his doctorate he studied for an Oxford B.A. which he was awarded in 1951.
By this time Woods had joined the New Zealand Defence Corps and they sent him to the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington in 1951.
In February 1954 Woods was appointed to a Senior Lectureship in Applied Mathematics at Sydney University.
Woods was Chairman of the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University from 1984 to 1989.
We should mention another important contribution by Woods.
The book received a better review in "The Aeroplane" than in the physics literature, and it seems to have been ignored by the axiomatic applied mathematics community, with whom Woods had also become embattled; he did not like "rigor mortis".

Born 6 December 1922, Reporoa, New Zealand. Died 15 April 2007, Oxford, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin New Zealand

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

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