Professor Edward Brian Davies FRS

Edward Brian Davies was Lecturer, and then Tutor and Fellow in Mathematics, at St John’s College (1970–81). He was an undergraduate and graduate at Oxford and, after receiving his DPhil and the Senior Mathematics Prize in 1968, he visited Princeton University (1968–69) and held a Moore Instructorship at MIT (1969–70).

Professor Davies was appointed to a Chair in Mathematics at King’s College London (KCL) in 1981 and was the Head of the Analysis Group there from 1990 until his retirement in 2010, having also been Head of Department (1990–93). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995 in recognition of his seminal work in spectral and scattering theory and the dynamics of quantum systems and for his pioneering work on heat kernels of diffusion equations on manifolds. In 1996, he was elected a Fellow of KCL. He was the recipient of the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) in 1998 and was the President of the LMS between 2007 and 2009. He was elected as an Honorary Fellow of St John’s in 2003 and was awarded the Pólya Prize of the LMS in 2011.

Colleagues and friends across Oxford will remember Brian warmly. In accordance with his wishes, there will be no funeral.