Mathematics and Statistics 1960s Reunion

Frank played a key role at the reunion and wrote the following piece for guests to read:

The reunion invitation led me to open some old dusty boxes containing my undergraduate lecture notes, and in one of these boxes I came across a 1964 copy of ‘Matrix’, the magazine of the Melbourne University Mathematics Society, run by students but supported by a few enthusiastic staff in the department. About one-third of the contributed articles were from staff or mathematicians with standing (including Tom Cherry, Jim Craggs, Bernard Neumann, Geoff Watterson and Ian Evans) and the remainder from we novices who then did not even have a bachelor’s degree to our names. The list of authors was almost prophetic, including:

Neil Roberts (A. McNeil Roberts) …later at UPNG and more recently at Overnewton School, just retired, so I have heard;
Ken Palmer ...returned to teach in the department for a while (1970s?);
Martin Chalkley …unfortunately, he died young;
John Price …later at ANU;
Solway Love (fourth years honours 1965 I think) …taught at the Secondary Teachers’ College for a few years but later became a music teacher (flautist);
Trevor Stanning …a good friend at the time but I have no idea where he ended up;
Alison Harcourt (nee Doig, on staff in Statistics back then I think) …she is still taking tutorials in mathematics and statistics now, in her eighties;
Roger Eggleton …returned to teach in the department for a while (early seventies) but again we last touch;
Derek Holton (for many years professor of Mathematics at Otago, and now spending his ‘retirement’ working on mathematics education projects in our Faculty of Education).
The editor of the magazine was Terry Speed (in recent times at Walter and Eliza Hall).
Professor Jim Craggs had an inimitable style, and his article in that 1964 magazine was entitled ‘How to Kill a Mathematician’ and began …
‘If every Australian who obtains a Master’s degree in mathematics in the next few years joins the staff of an Australian university, and no university teacher retires or leaves, the universities will still not fill all their vacancies for academic staff’.

But how wrong that statement turned out to be! By the early 1970s PhD graduates in mathematics were finding that first appointment harder to come by. Yet that gloomy snapshot had a positive effect on the morale of fourth year students in the mid-sixties: we were all very confident that we could walk into jobs of our choice, and generally did so.

During 1961-63 I shared classes with, and spent much time in the company of Michael Coulthard and Martin Rubinstein (elder brother of Hyam Rubinstein), both of whom I had known at Melbourne High School. Michael deserted mathematics to become a physicist and then worked for CSIRO, and at the end of 1963, Martin left to continue his studies in the United States. Another Martin, Martin Chalkley, had more aptitude for discrete mathematical topics than I, yet he found topics founded on analysis more difficult, so he and I formed our own tiny ‘study group’ as we weathered third and fourth year (1963, 1964). I also saw much of Neil Roberts, who joined us for some (but not all) lectures in third and fourth year.

Neil Roberts and John Strantzen (fourth year 1963: John spent most of his later academic life at LaTrobe) were obsessively keen members of the Melbourne University Table Tennis Club and we three were research students together in 1966/67. This pair persuaded me to play for the university in a low-grade table tennis team, which turned out to be a huge mistake, for I lost 34 of my 36 matches for that season. ‘As an aside …we were often in trouble with Shirley Flinn, the then secretary in the Mathematics Department, who did not tolerate with any equanimity the many table tennis bats and balls we used to leave in the tearoom.

I must confess that as an undergraduate I was not really over-anxious about my studies, and spent perhaps one-third of my time at university in extra-curricular activities. For me, student life in the nineteen-sixties was much more than the academic program. My friends and I spent an hour or three each day in the Melbourne University Union Building, which was much less crowded in those days. There were separate lounges for men and women, with old-style lounge chairs, providing a comfortable refuge for the occasional hour between lectures. There were ample meeting rooms for students clubs, chess and billiards rooms and voluminous personal lockers in the basement, all of which I frequented or used now and again. None of my acquaintances were engaged in paid work during term-time, as there were ample scholarships and studentships to be taken up, and so we had plenty of time to indulge in non-academic pursuits. My main study time was after dinner at night.

In the 1960s, the University of Melbourne Sports Union clubs were well financed, the support coming from the modest but compulsory student service-fee, so that the minority of students who belonged to one of the sporting clubs therefore were subsidised by those who did not. For example, all of the ammunition used by the Rifle Club members was paid for by the Sports Union. In addition to my Rifle Club obsession, I made frequent use of the on-campus sporting facilities.

During my forty years or so teaching in the Department of Mathematics, I perceived a marked fall-off in the participation of students in extracurricular activities at the university. Against a background of an increasing proportion of Year 12 students proceeding to university and falling governmental financial support for students’ living expenses, part-time work mixed with full-time study became common. Demands for course notes, access to lecturers by e-mail etc. became more intense as the decades rolled by. Back in the 1960s we were more self-sufficient (I think) in hunting down and constructing materials for ourselves, but then we had the time and the leisure, and there were relatively few of us I suppose. In retrospect we may have been undergraduates at the right time!

The 1960s were interesting politically. I do remember Tony Staley, Gareth Evans and others being active on campus then, but as an undergraduate I tried to ignore most of it. However, I confess to participating in one of the anti-Vietnam marches in the early 1970s, along with John Ryan (then a reader in the department) and others.

Departmental politics were different back in the 1960s. It is perhaps unkind to apply the term ‘god professor’ to the likes of Tom Cherry, Russell Love and Jim Craggs, given that they all helped me on my way. But the professors then were in no doubt that they were expected to give academic leadership, and that they did, generally not to be argued with. In those days, the professors addressed we students by our surnames, after the old English tradition. Of course (now using their surnames in payback) Cherry and Love completed their postgraduate degrees in Cambridge, and Craggs was from Southhampton.

As an eighteen-year-old, I thought Professor Russell Love to be a severe stern sort of person who knew all there was to know about mathematics, but late in the year he sat down next to me one day, in a ‘practice class’, and he recalled that he had taught my father some years before. During the following year (1963) I came to know him a little better, and I must say that his lectures on functions of a complex variable were the clearest of any that I attended during my undergraduate days, and his correction of our homework the most meticulous imaginable. I gradually came to understand that he was ‘integrity incarnate’. When he was head of department, he used to check every detail of every examination paper set by his staff, and I remember (in 1969) being the much-embarrassed beneficiary of his checking one of mine!
I was later to work in the department under Russell Love’s direction, and many decades later he took tutorial classes for me long after he had formally retired. It is fair to say that it took me nearly forty years to get to know him. I never could bring myself to address him as Russell, always to his face addressing him as Professor Love (though Martin Chalkley and I referred to him as ‘Prof’ in private).

Though I attended his lectures in a small third-year honours class in 1963, I did not get to know Professor Tom Cherry well. He lectured us in a chalk-covered black academic gown, almost never referring to his notes that for the most part remained in a closed manila folder on the front bench of the room. He was seldom animated, and there was always (metaphorically speaking) some distance between him and us, as third-year students were not of great consequence I suppose. Yet he had a good sense of humour. It must have been 1965, I think, after he was knighted: one day I saw him in the corridor of the department (then in Babel) and he gave me his usual curt nod. I cheekily said “good morning Sir Thomas” in a loud voice so that all around could hear. He looked astonished then broke into a broad grin. After that, he always said hello to me. Sadly, he died a year or two later after getting lost on a bush walk.

Professor Jim Craggs was our fourth year applied mathematics lecturer and was later my supervisor for my master’s thesis. He was a good listener, though asserted himself when decisions had to be made. Quite unlike Russell Love and Tom Cherry, he had a little bit of the larrikin about him, and was clearly more interested in mathematics than the duties of head of department. He was temporarily head (in Russell Love’s absence on sabbatical leave) and one afternoon he was helping me with an intractable system of differential equations associated with a problem in elasticity. Shirley Flinn (the departmental secretary) knocked on the door of his office and came in with a bundle of papers ‘from the faculty’. She impressed upon Jim Craggs the urgency of the matter within these papers and he replied calmly that he understood. When she left, he picked up the bundle and dumped it in the waste-paper basket, turned to me and said: ‘now where were we?’. I presume that he retrieved the bundle later and dealt with it. As I recall, Jim Craggs only stayed in Melbourne for about three or four years, returning to Southampton early in 1967.

The late 1960s saw the beginnings of the (national) Applied Mathematics Conferences, with Bill Wood (my PhD supervisor) and Roger Grimshaw being heavily involved. This was a time of considerable applied mathematical activity in the department, particularly in fluid mechanics, and ties were established with like-minded mathematicians at Monash and CSIRO. Paradoxically the department languished without an applied mathematics professor for many years. There are probably machinations to be told about that era, of which I was largely ignorant, being a very junior member of staff at that time.
Most of my lecturers were good communicators. I am moved to mention some of whom I hold fond memories:

Ian Evans (first and second year Pure Mathematics 1961, 1962);
John Ryan (first year Applied Mathematics 1961);
Tom O’Donnell (first year Physical Chemistry 1961);
Bill Wignall (second year Physics 1962);
Russell Love (second and third year Pure Mathematics 1962, 1963);
John Barton (second year Applied Mathematics 1962);
Tom Cherry (third year Applied Mathematics 1963);
Bruce Craven (fourth year Pure Mathematics 1964) and
Jim Craggs (fourth year Applied Mathematics 1964).
Note that there is not a single female in the list - the department really was predominantly male in those days! There were two ladies (parlance of the day) on the lecturing staff (Meg Lester and Elizabeth Pownall) with whom I had no professional contact as an undergraduate. In 1965 (during which year I took time out to complete Dip Ed), Elizabeth was responsible for procuring for me my first teaching job, and in 1966 Meg and I were deeply involved together in constructing exercises for Jim Craggs’ ‘new applied mathematics course’ – continuum mechanics in first year!

Enough for now! I can of course tell many stories, some of which should never be put in print!

Cheers, Frank Barrington

I have many fond memories of my years at Melbourne University. I arrived in Melbourne from Tasmania in 1956 and (wisely) undertook a second matriculation year. I might well have floundered otherwise. My 2nd matric. was undertaken at the now defunct St Patrick’s College, East Melbourne. It provided an intellectual atmosphere that I had missed in the island state, even tho’ Mathematics (my field of interest) was perhaps the weakest of their offerings.

The intellectual atmosphere went up a further notch with my entry into the University of Melbourne. In my first year (1957), Pure Maths was taught by Associate Professor Felix Behrend, one of the ‘Dunera Boys’ and a consummate mathematician in the Weierstrassian mold. In those days, Mathematics was seen as an Arts subject, and one needed to have a matric qualification in a language other than English. So my St Pat’s experience meant a forced study of Latin, which was well taught and has continued to stand me in good stead, altho’ I would have preferred to try French, which I already spoke tolerably well.

In subsequent years my teachers included the late Professors Russell Love and Sir Thomas Cherry. Love, in particular, was a superb lecturer. It was said of him that he was a menace because he made his subject seem so straightforward and logical that one missed seeing its difficulties. Cherry was a charismatic departmental head, and a man with a wide range of interests.

When the Honours stream crystallized, there were 11 of us working in Pure & Applied Mathematics, and a 12th (Daryl Daley), who became a Professor at ANU) studying Pure Maths & Statistics. In the class order, the other 11 were:
Ian Sloan, now a well-known numerical analyst, and Brian Kenny, who became an associate professor of Theoretical Physics at UWA until ill-health forced him into early retirement.

Peter Brockwell, who moved into Statistics and has made quite a name for himself.

John McPhee, whom I’d met at St Pat’s and who showed early promise (Behrend saw to it that one of his 2nd year essays made into the Journal of the London Mathematical Society). He died recently.

Peter Gill, who subsequently became head of Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide.

Those were the recipients of first-class honours.

Colin Sholl (Sholl) and I topped the seconds. Colin went on to become an emeritus professor of Theoretical Physics at Armidale and I made a career at Monash before ill-health forced my own early retirement.

Charles Osborne and Dieter Rosenthal (later Ross) rounded out the 2A’s. Ross worked at LaTrobe but died young; Osborne continues a research career at Monash.
There was one 2B and this went to Neal Sloane (Neil), who probably has the best international reputation of us all. Thus are early predictors thwarted!
The final place and solitary 3rd went to Laurie Drake, a Jesuit scholastic, who also rose to prominence, becoming the director of Riverview Observatory. He died some years ago, and several papers carried glowing obituaries.

During the undergraduate years of this cohort, Mathematics was moved from the Arts faculty to Science and we were offered the choice of which degree to take. I chose Science.

I went on to study for a Master’s degree under Russell Love, my topic being ‘Systems of Integral Equations’. At this time, I was a part-time tutor sharing an office with Alan Jones, who later moved to Queensland and made great contributions to Australian Mathematics. In 1962, I was appointed senior tutor and for the 1st term of 1963, before I left for the USA, acting lecturer.

The years immediately following mine also saw several names that subsequently became prominent. I recall in particular the late Barrie Milne, Andrew Prentice, John Stillwell, Roger Eggleton and the brilliant if erratic George Rousseau. A colleague of this time was Allen Russell,a protégé of Love’s, who later took up a study of financial Mathematics, which had been a sideline of Love’s.

Outside of Mathematics itself, there was a lively intellectual ferment. The charismatic Vincent Buckley was perhaps at his best during this period. Franz Knopfelmacher was assiduously active, altho’ manipulative and dogmatic in his politics. Other names from this period include two more mathematicians, John Barton and the late John Ryan, but also others such as the biochemist Max Marginson, the student counsellor, Bob Priestley, the lively and committed Barbara Falk, and, of course, ‘Pansy’ Wright, to whom I owe a personal debt of gratitude because he very generously wrote in support of my scholarship application in the US. All in all, they were very good years!

One of my main recollections is the excitement of actually being at University. It’s not such a big deal these days. Most of us were the first in our families to reach tertiary education. Science was held in high esteem, probably as a result of the advances made in the Second World War and the consequences of that. Most of us had Commonwealth scholarships or teaching scholarships so we didn’t have to earn to pay for our tuition. We could concentrate on learning new things, socialising and soaking up the freedom. All of this made for a memorable experience.

An incident I remember was giving the real analysis lecturer (Dr Russell?) a rubber stamp at the end of the term with the standard, technical phrase that he applied in nearly every proof, given and arbitrary

The potential theory lecturer, who filled the board in a haphazard way, rubbing out holes and connecting them, was Dr Bill Wood.
Bruce Craven was teaching us Topology. On the last day before he went on sabbatical, four of us carried a largish box on our shoulders into the lecture theatre with Michael Cwikel in the lead playing ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ on his violin. When Bruce opened the box a few helium balloons popped out and rose to the ceiling. From them, at about nose level, dangled a large sheet of cardboard on which I had written some doggerel in the style of AA Milne something like Mr Craven the acting prof, is off. Bruce was last seen happily wandering down the corridor clutching his balloons. He had a sense of humour.

Best wishes, Bill Haebich

Here are a couple of anecdotes concerning Dr Upton, our most delightful and inspiring 1st year and 4th year lecturer.

In 1966 there were quite a few of us in Pure 1A with Dr Upton, probably around 60 or so. After that year we next saw Dr Upton at the start of Pure IV – there were then only about 20 of us. Dr Upton greeted us on the first day of term 1 with ‘It’s very nice to see some of you back again’.
Pure IV was quite heady stuff – integration over complex surfaces, venturing into the 4th (and therefore even higher) dimensions, etc. We would often leave the lecture theatre sharply shaking our heads so as to knock what we had just heard (and were expected to absorb) into some kind of normality.

One day, during an exposition on a particular theorem, Dr Upton was in the course of providing the proof on the blackboard. At one point he stated “And it’s obvious that … …” … and he paused …. and he paused …. and he paused for what seemed like a very long time while he contemplated. Then, eventually, he said “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is obvious that …”.

Do I have any news to share? Well, my professional career has been fairly simple:

1. I did an honours degree BSc (Hons) at Melbourne from 1962 to 1965. Then in 1966 and the first half of 1967 I did an MSc under the joint supervision of Dr Bruce Craven and Dr CJF Upton, with a thesis ‘On some aspects of functional analysis’.

2. Then until 1971 I was at Flinders University where I worked as a tutor and completed a PhD under the supervision of Professor Brian Abrahamson with a thesis entitled ‘Operator Thoery on Quaternionic Hilbert Spaces’.

3. This was followed by two appointments as a lecturer in Mathematics at African universities, firstly at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria during the (northern) 1971/72 academic year, and then until early 1976 at the Univeristy of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

4. In 1976 I left academic and mathematical work because personal reasons made it desirable to return to Australia. From 1976 to January 2011 I held a number of positions in the Victorian Health Department. This was a complete career change. I worked initially on the development and evaluation of the Early Childhood Development Program and on health workforce issues. Then from 1982 to 1989 I was manager of the Health Statistics Unit, and finally at the time of my retirement I was a senior information policy advisor.

While it would be difficult and probably unhelpful to attempt a full description of nearly 35 years as a public servant with the Health Department, two of the long-running themes of my work may shed some light on the sort of contribution a mathematician can make in this type of environment.

Firstly, for a number of years I was able to provide briefings and advice to support the Department's involvement, and in some cases leadership, in national health statistics forums such as the National Health Information Standards and Statistics Committee. This intergovernmental committee and its predecessors are basically about developing high quality statistical information about the health status of Australians and health services in Australia, and in particular maintaining and improving the comparability of the statistical information collected by the various Commonwealth, State and Territory health authorities and agencies such as the Australian Institute of Health & Welfare and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Secondly, for many years I had the very satisfying task of acting as a data custodian for a number of major health statistical collections maintained by the Victorian Health Department, which involved providing guidance to epidemiologists and other health researchers in government and universities on how to make the best use of hospital-based statistical information while protecting the privacy of individual patients.

During this period I haven't had much contact with people at Melbourne Maths Department but have fond memories of some of my contemporaries (including Frank Barrington who looks quite recognisable in some of the latest photos). I also have particularly fond memories of the late Professor ER Love, who lived not far from my home and who always had time for a chat when I met him.

Best wishes, Dr Neil Powers