Williams S

On Friday 12 April 2002, Professor BH Neumann presented a BH Neumann Award to Dr Sheila Williams.

Sheila Williams receives her Award from Professor Neumann, at the function at Quay West Hotel, Brisbane.

Sheila Williams with Neil (also a holder of this award) and Neil's parents Colin and Marjory.

Citation

Sheila Williams was born in Cornwall. Her parents were both teachers. Her father was in fact a school headmaster at Tintagel, on the north coast of Cornwall (where King Arthur is is said to have been born).

She passed the notorious 11+ exam when she was ten, and went to Sir James Smith's Grammar School, Camelford. This was a very small school; less than 200 students and about 10 teachers.

However, as is the case with so many of us, Sheila had an inspiring teacher, a Mr Alfred Hooper. He was a local, who, having got a first in mathematics at university, had chosen to go back to Cornwall to teach and those with any mathematical talent blossomed under his tutelage.

When Sheila entered the sixth form she chose for her A level subjects Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. She spent an extra year at school in order to take the Oxford Entrance examination, and was fortunate enough to win a scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford.

Here she was fortunate to be at a College with an inspiring tutor, Ida Busbridge, and together with Mr Hooper's lecture notes, particularly those on projective and Euclidean geometry, progressed very well. One aspect of mathematics which impressed her at the time was the fact that it was sometimes easier to prove a more general result.

It was this sort of idea that made the theorem in her thesis work; the idea came to her while crossing the High in Oxford. As Sheila observed, the great thing about mathematics is that you can do it anywhere!)

After Sheila's honours degree she stayed on at Oxford to do a D. Phil. under the supervision of Graham Higman. It was the work in this that gave rise to the "Oates-Powell Theorem" (Oates was Sheila's maiden name and Martin Powell was also a student of Graham Higman; they each did one case of the result in their respective theses).

Sheila became first a Lecturer and then a Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford, which was the first of the women's colleges at Oxford to have two mathematics Fellows.

In 1965 Sheila first came to Australia and in 1966 became a Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle before going on to the University of Queensland, where she became a Reader, a position she held until her retirement in February 1997. She married Neil in 1979.

Sheila's first encounter with any form of mathematics enrichment occurred when approached by Henry Finucan, who then ran the QAMT mathematics competition, to supervise one of the sessions held at the University of Queensland. But she was not really involved until Neil became State Director of AMOC in 1981.

For the first few years of his tenure, Neil arranged, whenever possible, for the students he was training to have monthly sessions with an academic at their nearest tertiary institution. Sheila was called in to help, and found the experience thoroughly enjoyable.

Around this time, Neil took on responsibility for the QAMT competition, and Sheila found herself rather more involved - as well as supervising a session on the day of the competition, She worked through the problems in the first draft, producing a different set of solutions and looking for mistakes or ambiguities.

Sheila also did the final marking of the top papers in several sections. This is now in the past, as this was one of the many duties that Neil relinquished when he retired last year.

In 1988 Sheila attended the International Mathematical Olympiad in Canberra, as a marking co-ordinator. This she found very interesting; she found that it was quite surprising what languages she could cope with on the strength of her French and Latin - at least when what she was reading was mathematics! It was not long after this that Peter O'Halloran 'phoned to ask if she would join the AMC Problems Committee. She accepted his invitation with some trepidation, but has found it a most rewarding twelve years. Sheila has had a very productive time in this role, and many of the memorable problems in the AMC have been authored by her, especially the ones which contain Cornish names.

Sheila is also a keen needleworker, and is noted for her general knowledge, three times having appeared on the ABC series Mastermind, where she was successful on general questions, and on the special topics "The history of science fiction", "The works of Lewis Caroll" and "The life and Poldark novels of Winston Graham". The last one was the most successful - she managed to get into the semifinal.

Since her retirement Sheila has continued her involvement with mathematics; refereeing and reviewing, as well as working for the QAMT competition and the AMC. She also been able to indulge another interest of hers, languages, particularly Cornish, which is enjoying a revival after having virtually died out in the eighteenth century.

Peter Taylor

Friday 12 April 2002