University of Cambridge During his first three years at
Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a scholar, Pedoe was tutored in mathematics by Arthur Stanley Ramsey, the father of
Frank P. Ramsey. He attended lectures by
Ludwig Wittgenstein and
Bertrand Russell, although he was unimpressed by the teaching style of either great man. Geometry became his main interest and, advised by
Henry Baker, he started work on his doctorate and published several papers. In 1935, he attended the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked with
Solomon Lefschetz.
University of Southampton and Freeman Dyson After returning to England in 1936, Pedoe was appointed as an assistant lecturer of the mathematics department at the
University College, Southampton. More of his papers were published and after(?) 1937, he was awarded his PhD on the strength of his thesis,
The Exceptional Curves on an Algebraic Surface, which was based on Henry Baker's work on the
Italian theory of
algebraic surfaces; he was examined by
W. V. D. Hodge and Baker at Cambridge. In the late 1930s, Pedoe married Mary Tunstall, an English geographer and the couple had a daughter, Naomi, and identical twin sons,
Dan and
Hugh, born in December 1939. By 1941,
Winchester College had lost several teachers to the army and had become unable to meet its teaching commitments. They requested help and Pedoe was asked to assist with the teaching of mathematics. He taught junior and senior classes (the juniors could be unruly) and in the senior class one of the students was
Freeman Dyson who showed enormous early talent and was strongly encouraged by Pedoe with extra work and reading. Their friendship lasted more than fifty more years until Pedoe's death in 1998 and Dyson's list of people who have most influenced him begins "Hardy, Pedoe...". In 1941 a collaboration with
W. V. D. Hodge started which lasted some twelve years and included the writing of the huge three-volume work,
Methods of Algebraic Geometry. Although the book was originally designed as a geometric counterpart of
G. H. Hardy's
A Course of Pure Mathematics it was never intended as a textbook and contains original material. First published in the 1940s, all three volumes were reprinted by
Cambridge University Press in 1995. Pedoe published three more papers in 1942:
A remark on a property of a special pencil of quadrics,
On some geometrical inequalities and
An inequality for two triangles.
Birmingham University and Westfield College In 1942, Pedoe moved to
Birmingham for a lectureship at the
University of Birmingham, working mainly in engineering mathematics. The family were not happy there, the local air pollution affected his children and Pedoe did not like the working environment. The professor of mathematical physics at Birmingham was
Rudolf Peierls, who was working on the British project to develop the
atomic bomb; he suggested to Pedoe that he, Pedoe, should do some war-work. He did so, and worked part-time to improve
piston rings so as to emulate German
dive-bombing tactics. In 1947 he moved to
Westfield College, part of the
University of London, as a reader in mathematics. Once again, he was unhappy, both from domestic and professional points of view: his salary was insufficient for him to afford to buy a family home and he found the working environment to be "a strain".
Khartoum and Singapore Encouraged by Mary to look abroad, he was appointed as head of the mathematics department at the
University of Khartoum in
the Sudan and took up the role in 1952 on trial basis with leave of absence from Westfield College. When Westfield pressed for firm decision, he resigned and stayed at Khartoum for seven years: the length of his contract. It was during this period that he wrote many of his books including
The Gentle Art of Mathematics,
Circles and a textbook,
An Introduction to projective geometry. Pedoe found the time at Khartoum to his taste; there was a comfortable life-style that allowed him to write and the family joined him each Christmas. Eventually, Mary stayed with him permanently, the children remaining in England. In 1959, he was appointed as head of the mathematics department at the University of Singapore by Sir
Alexander Oppenheim.
Purdue and Minnesota Unwilling to retire at 55, the statutory retirement age in Singapore, he moved again, to
Indiana in 1962, to take up a position at
Purdue University, near
Lafayette. Although the location was somewhat isolated, there was an active social life and he was kept busy. One of the positions he held there was as Senior Mathematician to the Minnesota College Geometry Project, which was to improve geometry teaching in high schools and colleges by making films and writing accompanying books. After two years at Purdue, he was appointed as a professor at the
University of Minnesota where he stayed until he retired in 1980, when he was made
professor emeritus. He won a
Lester R. Ford Award in 1968.
San Gaku Pedoe's interest and work continued after his retirement and in 1984 he was approached by Hidetoshi Fukagawa, a high-school teacher in
Aichi, Japan. Fukagawa had tried unsuccessfully to interest Japanese academics in
San Gaku – Japanese wooden tablets containing geometric theorems which had hung in temples and shrines for around two centuries as offerings to the gods. A collaboration started which resulted in the publication of the book,
Japanese Temple Geometry Problems by the
Charles Babbage Research Centre in Canada. The book succeeded in arousing interest in this uniquely Japanese form of mathematics. == Death ==