RIP Peter Neumann (1940–2020)

This morning, I saw the terrible news that my former Oxford colleague Peter Neumann died today, supposedly due to complications from COVID-19 (although I can't verify if that is the known cause of death). Here is is Peter's Wikipedia entry.

I had the chance to interact with Peter quite a few times at Oxford. When I knew him, he was concentrating on mathematics history, and I contacted him with a query about some mathematical linguistics (concerning, for example, the use of "topological" only versus both "geometric" and "geometrical"). I knew that Peter was the right person to approach when I wanted to dive deeper than what I was able to do via Google. Here is my 2013 blog entry about that.

Peter was one of the people in Oxford who was always so kind and supportive of me (and, from what I can tell, of many others as well). When I got some pointed negative teaching evaluations, Peter invited me to The Queen's College to dinner to chat about things (and to give gentle advice and so on). But if I am getting rewarded with a dinner like that for messing up, it does create strange incentives. My students in my courses now are certainly benefiting from advice Peter gave me over the years. He also supported me in various fights on committees (we were on Teaching Committee together) and particularly in efforts that I made against "We've always done it this way." comments to try to change things in Oxford's Mathematical Institute.

(Tip of the cap to Card Colm Mulcahy.)