50th Anniversary Reunion

David A. Brannan

After graduating, I went to Imperial College in London to do a PhD in Complex Analysis. The years 1964-67 were really a time to live in London, the “Swinging 60s” at their peak! To celebrate getting our degrees a group of us went to the Cairngorms and built an igloo that we lived in for a few days.

Then two of us spent 2 months on Greyhound Buses going round USA clockwise, on a “99 days for $99” ticket. (The other chap later devised the bidding system for the UK government to auction telephone waveband licenses.) We visited New Orleans, Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Yosemite, Niagara Falls and lots of other places – the journey of a lifetime. I then had my first two jobs in the USA at the University of Maryland just outside Washington and Syracuse University, NY.

In 1968-70 I had a Lectureship back in the Mathematics Department at Glasgow, working with the staff who'd taught me and a lot of people my own age (– we were the first group not to use gowns for lectures!). Having met my future wife at a local dance, we got married and I looked at buying a house and possibly at working in a university with other complex analysts. We moved to London University, where I worked in Queen Elizabeth College – originally Kings College for Women, founded in 1916, and more recently remerged with Chelsea College into a bigger Kings College! We had three sons in 1971, 1972 and 1975, all of whom grew up with English accents and split national loyalties. I served as Council Secretary of the London Mathematical Society (“LMS”, the English national learned society in Mathematics) in 1971-81.

Then in 1979 I moved to a Chair at the Open University, and the family moved to Bedford to live (it turned out that Robert the Bruce owned a lot of land in the Bedford area, and a local school is named after him).  I was Head of the Pure Mathematics Department till 1996, when I became Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computing. In 1986-96 I served as Publications Secretary of the LMS, and had a lot to do with the Russian Academy of Sciences and its translation journals, either side of perestroika and the attack on the White House in central Moscow: it was an exciting time to visit Russia.  I had to learn a great deal about quite new things such as budgeting, employment law, Computing, academic politics, and the like … . And in 1999-2002 I served as Secretary of the European Mathematical Society, which involved a lot of travelling to pleasant new places. In addition, I went annually to Singapore where OU had an academic link, and a couple of times to Kuwait and Hong Kong.

I retired (involuntarily!) at 65 in 2007. Since then I have done a new edition of my book on ‘Geometry' (which seemed to hit a gap in the current market) and a corrected edition of my ‘First Course in Analysis' (a labour of many years). We are now almost finished renovating our house and garden, eventually … .

All my children now work for different parts of the Civil Service, and two are married; we have three lovely grandchildren (all boys).