Thomas Room was born on 10 November 1902, near
London,
England. He studied mathematics in
St John's College, Cambridge, and was a
wrangler in 1923. He continued at Cambridge as a graduate student, and was elected as a fellow in 1925, but instead took a position at the
University of Liverpool. He returned to Cambridge in 1927, at which time he completed his PhD, with a thesis supervised by
H. F. Baker. Room remained at Cambridge until 1935, when he moved to the
University of Sydney, where he accepted the position of Chair of the Mathematics Department, a position he held until his retirement in 1968. During
World War II he worked for the Australian government, helping to
decrypt Japanese communications. In January 1940, with the encouragement of the Australian Army, he, together with some colleagues at the University of Sydney, began to study Japanese codes. The others were the mathematician Richard Lyons and the classicists
Arthur Dale Trendall and
Athanasius Treweek. By this time Room had already begun learning Japanese under Margaret Ethel Lake (1883-?) at the University of Sydney. In May 1941 Room and Treweek attended a meeting at the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne with the Director of Naval Intelligence of the
Royal Australian Navy, several Australian Army intelligence officers and
Eric Nave, an expert Japanese cryptographer with the Royal Australian Navy. As a result, it was agreed that Room's group, with the agreement of the University of Sydney, would move in August 1941 to work under Nave at the Special Intelligence Bureau in Melbourne. On 1 September 1941, Room was sent to the
Far East Combined Bureau in Singapore to study the codebreaking techniques used there. After the outbreak of war they were working for
FRUMEL (Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne), a joint American-Australian intelligence unit, but when Lieutenant Rudolph Fabian took over command of FRUMEL and particularly when, in October 1942, FRUMEL was placed under direct control of the US Navy, civilians such as the member of Room's group were found surplus to requirements and returned to their academic posts. After the war, Room served as dean of the faculty of science at the University of Sydney from 1952 to 1956 and again from 1960 to 1965. He also held visiting positions at the
University of Washington in 1948, and the
Institute for Advanced Study and
Princeton University in 1957. He retired from Sydney in 1968 but took short-term positions afterwards at
Westfield College in London and the
Open University before returning to Australia in 1974. He died on 2 April 1986. Room married Jessica Bannerman, whom he met in Sydney, in 1937; they had one son and two daughters. ==Research==