Professor Elmer Rees

Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh; Visiting Professor, University of Bristol

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of Professor Elmer Rees.

Elmer Gethin Rees was born in Carmarthenshire, West Wales, on 9 November 1941 and died on 4 October 2019.

Elmer was an undergraduate in Cambridge and a PhD student at Warwick. After Warwick, he held short-term positions in Hull, IAS Princeton and Swansea. Then, in 1971, he was appointed to a fellowship in St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He left Oxford in 1979 for a professorship in Edinburgh, where he stayed until 2005.

His research interests were in geometry and topology, and his publications cover the full range of this broad field. There are two particularly notable collaborations in his work: the first with Emery Thomas from Berkeley, and the second with Victor Buchstaber from Moscow.

He was very active in all aspects of mathematical life, research, teaching, and service. One of Elmer’s lasting contributions to the mathematical community was his role in establishing the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh in 1990. He was the Founding Director of the Heilbronn Institute of Mathematical Research from 2005 until 2009. In 2009 Elmer was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Elmer was a Welsh-speaking Welshman and this was very important to him. He had an infectious sense of humour and a seemingly endless collection of anecdotes. Combined with an underlying seriousness of purpose, this made him a wonderful person to work with.

Read the full obituary at: https://doi.org/10.1112/blms.70082