Peter Killworth

Professor Peter D. Killworth (27 March 1946 – 28 January 2008) was an English scientist known for his work on oceanography and on the study of social networks.

The major part of Peter Killworth's career was spent as an oceanographer, using applied mathematics to understand ocean dynamics.

He had varied interests across the whole of physical oceanography, including the study of ice, polynyas, Rossby waves, instabilities and eddies.

[4] Killworth's work was marked by several awards, including a Fellowship from the American Geophysical Union in 2000; the Fridtjof Nansen Medal from the European Geophysical Society in 2002;[5] and the Stommel Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society in 2008 for his "many important contributions to ocean modelling and theoretical oceanography".

[6] Over the next few years, the partnership would work extensively on the so-called "small world", examining differences in the answers to questions such as "how many people does the average person think they know?"

Killworth's interest in social networks increasingly focused on answering challenging questions about issues on which responses from individuals in questionnaires could not be trusted or were unlikely to be reliable, and where direct empirical data was lacking – "apparently uncountable populations".

Peter Killworth wrote the groundbreaking mainframe computer game Brand X with fellow mathematician Jonathan Mestel.

Killworth described these games as "unashamed puzzlefests, you can die in lots of (hopefully funny) ways – but undo will cure that – and it's very easy to get stuck.