Professor Ian Sneddon

Professor Ian Sneddon, OBE, mathematician, was born on December 8, 1919. He was educated at Hyndland High School before completing a First Class Honours degree at the University of Glasgow in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in 1940.

After this he was awarded the Bryce Fellowship, which took him on to further study at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1943, Sneddon began working as a scientific officer with the Ministry of Supply at the Armaments Research and Development Establishment at Fort Halstead. After the war, he spent a year in Bristol working and collaborating with Neville Mott on nuclear physics, in particular on a publication entitled ‘Wave Mechanics and its Applications’ in 1948.

Sneddon returned to the University of Glasgow as a Lecturer in Natural Philosophy from 1946-1950, and then became the first Professor of Mathematics at the new University of North Staffordshire at Keele. Sneddon came back to the University of Glasgow and took the new Simson Chair of Mathematics in 1956, and remained until his retirement in 1985, though he still continued to work on mathematics as a Honorary Senior Research Fellow. During this time Professor Sneddon was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1958, and also served twice as a vice-president. He was appointed OBE in 1969, and also received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Hull, Strathclyde, Warsaw and from the Heriot-Watt University.

Professor Sneddon passed away in November 2000.