Ian G. Macdonald

He was offered a position at Manchester University in 1957 by Max Newman, on the basis of work he had done while outside academia.

In 1960 he moved to the University of Exeter, and in 1963 became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

His 1979 book Symmetric Functions and Hall Polynomials has become a classic.

His was the first text to integrate much classical theory, such as Hall polynomials, Schur functions, the Littlewood–Richardson rule, with the abstract algebra approach.

It was both an expository work and, in part, a research monograph, and had a major impact in the field.