Robin Wilson is an Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, Emeritus Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, and a former Fellow of Keble College, Oxford University. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. A former President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, he has written and edited over 40 books on a variety of subjects, including Lewis Carroll in Numberland and Stamping Through Mathematics on the history of mathematics, Introduction to Graph Theory and Four Colours Suffice on graph theory, and How to Solve Sudoku. He is a regular contributor to the Mathematical Intelligencer.

Long involved with the popularization of mathematics and its history, Prof. Wilson has been awarded the Mathematical Association of America’s Lester Ford award for his ‘outstanding expository writing’, and the Stanton Medal for outreach activities in combinatorics by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.

Professor Wilson will be bringing his popular, illustrated lecture on the development of mathematics as portrayed through stamps to the 8ECM. The accompanying exhibition will feature more than 200 stamps from around the world. All are from Prof. Wilson’s private collection and are included in Stamping Through Mathematics. The exhibition will be on display in the near vicinity of the 8ECM venue and, as with the lecture, will be open to the general public.

In more philatelic news, a special postage stamp will also be issued by Post of Slovenia for the occasion of the 8ECM. Further details will be available on the 8ECM website.

We look forward to welcoming Prof. Wilson at the 8ECM in July!

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_{(Photo: Gersham College)}

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Wilson_(mathematician)

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/oct/07/academicexperts.maths

Wilson, Robin J. Stamping Through Mathematics. New York: Springer, 2001.