[2] Most of the Kindertransport children never saw their parents again but Karl was lucky and his mother soon joined him, and they moved to London in 1943 where he entered Kilburn Grammar School.

[3] In 1946 he won a scholarship to study mathematics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he received a BA degree in 1950 (duly upgraded to MA (Cantab.)

He got his PhD in 1954 under Philip Hall at Cambridge with his treatise "A Contribution to the Theory of Commutators in Groups and Associative Rings".

[5] He was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship which made it possible for him to spend 1955–56 at Harvard[3] and then 1956–57 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

[5] In 1967 he moved back to Queen Mary College where he became a leading figure in the algebra research community[3] and where he remained for the rest of his career.