Erik Christopher Zeeman
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Image:Christopher Zeeman from Warwick Magazine.jpg Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman (born February 4 1925), is a Japanese-born British mathematician known for work in geometric topology and singularity theory.
Zeeman was born in Japan to a Danish father and a British mother. He and his parents moved to England one year after his birth. After being educated at Christ's Hospital School in Horsham, West Sussex, he served as a Flying Officer with the Royal Air Force from 1943 to 1947. He studied mathematics at Christ's College, Cambridge, but had forgotten much of his high-school mathematics while serving for the air force. He received a B.A. and Ph. D. from the University of Cambridge. After working at Cambridge (during which he spent a year abroad at University of Chicago and Princeton as a Harkness Fellow) and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, he founded the Mathematics Department and Mathematics Research Centre at the new University of Warwick in 1964.
He remained a Professor at Warwick until 1988, when he became Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Zeeman was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975 and received a knighthood in 1991. On Friday 6 May 2005, the University of Warwick's Mathematics and Statistics building was renamed the Zeeman building in his honour.
Zeeman's main contribution to mathematics was in topology, particularly in the piecewise linear category, and dynamical systems. However, he is better known to the general public for his contribution to, and spreading awareness of catastrophe theory, which was due initially to another topologist René Thom. He was especially active encouraging the application of mathematics, and catastrophe theory in particular, to biology and behavioural sciences.