Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester

Since its formation, the department has made some influential appointments including the topologist Viktor Buchstaber and model theorist Alex Wilkie.

In 1885 Horace Lamb, famous for his contribution to fluid dynamics accepted a chair at the VUM and under his leadership the department grew rapidly.

Newman wrote: In 1907 famous analyst and number theorist John Edensor Littlewood was appointed to the Richardson Lectureship which he held for three years.

During 1912–1913 the pioneer of weather forecasting and numerical analysis Lewis Fry Richardson worked at Manchester College of Science and Technology (later to become UMIST).

He brought in Reinhold Baer, G. Billing, Paul Erdős, Chao Ko, Kurt Mahler, and Beniamino Segre.

Although Manchester was later to be known as the birthplace of the electronic computer, Douglas Hartree made an earlier contribution building a differential analyser in 1933.

Mordell was succeeded by the famous topologist and cryptanalyst Max Newman in 1945 who, as head of department, transformed it into a centre of international renown.

In pure mathematics, Bernhard Neumann, an influential group theorist, joined the department at VUM in 1948, leaving as a Reader in 1961 to take a chair in Australia.

With the rapid expansion of higher education and the starting of an undergraduate mathematics degree this changed, and by 1968 the 15-storey Maths and Social Sciences Building (MSS) was completed on UMIST campus to house the growing department.

The statistics group also grew in strength with an emphasis on time series, led by Maurice Priestley and also Tata Subba Rao.

In 1986 pure mathematics at UMIST was strengthened by the appointment of Martin J. Taylor FRS, famous for his work on properties and structures of algebraic numbers.