Nunn was a brilliant teacher of science and mathematics, and a pioneer in these subjects of the 'new' methods which he was to advocate in general terms during the rest of his career. His lectures and demonstrations continued to be an inspiration to generations of apprentice science teachers.

His essay for this award was an original contribution in the field of differential geometry, a subject in which he retained a keen delight throughout his life and which led him to write two published works: a dissertation on moving axes, and a detailed and authoritative investigation into the foundations of analytical geometry.

I could wish that the task of reviewing this important book had fallen into more competent hands; but I have had no difficulty in seeing that it is extraordinarily good, and feel that if my qualifications as a critic were higher its merits would appear to me still more conspicuous. It possesses, I think, all the qualities needed to give distinction to a work in this genre. An immense amount of laborious thinking must have gone to its making, yet it is never heavy or dull; it is based upon wide learning, but the learning is felt in the fibre, not exhibited for admiration; the diction is economical, lucid and precise; and the mathematical craftsmanship is of the highest order.

Ramanujan's place in history was determined not when his first letter to Hardy showered fireworks in the Cambridge sky in 1913, for he resisted all immediate efforts to attract him to England, but when in Madras a year later he put into my hands the now famous Notebook and suggested that I should take it and examine it at my leisure. Only in a slight degree was the compliment personal to me; to Ramanujan then Hardy was a name on paper, and Walker and Littlehailes were parts of the governing machine, but I was a human being. Nevertheless, if Hardy could long remember with satisfaction that he could recognise at once what a treasure he had found, I too can be proud, for if I had failed to win the confidence of Ramanujan and his friends, Ramanujan would not have followed me to England. Nor could my failure have been remedied; before the autumn, that is, before any other visitor from Cambridge could have made contact with him, war was raging, and five years were to elapse before communication between India and England was again easy.

[Neville's opposition to man killing man] was an obstacle, throughout his life, to academic advancement in spite of his brilliance, as many educational authorities think that a man is not fit to teach the young if he dislikes having them slaughtered. I was fond of him, particularly because of his gentleness.

One can only conjecture whether his Fellowship might have been renewed had he not declared his opinion, but the fact is that he moved from Cambridge never to return.

You are all mathematicians, but almost all of you are something more than mathematicians; you are astronomers, meteorologists, physicists, or whatever it may be. Few mathematicians who are nothing but mathematicians attend the meetings of our Association regularly, and in this Chair I am not only a fish out of water, but a very small fish at that: you should see the ones that got away!

As a teacher he was an inspiring guide (though sometimes so far ahead as to be almost out of sight) but with the small classes of those days - there were never more than three of us in the honours group - a lecture could always become a seminar if we wished, and he delighted in the arguments which could develop. If his less able students sometimes found him difficult to follow, this was due, I believe, to the fact that his own mind worked so rapidly and his own knowledge was so immense that he just could not understand how anyone could find the work difficult.

The resulting report recommended dividing school geometry into stages: experimental, deductive, systematising, and advanced.

It is perhaps not giving away a secret to say that T P Nunn and E H Neville were the two principally responsible for the Report, which has been a best-seller ever since.

Mathematics has been called by a vast number of fanciful names, and I daresay "the food of gods" is among these, but the application I have to make of the phrase is to a very definite problem, which impressed itself on me when I discovered some months ago, to my sincere surprise, that if I had sat for an entrance scholarship at Cambridge within the last year or two I should have had a fair prospect of success. Do not misunderstand me. I am not boasting childishly that knowing what I know now I ought to find the papers easy. I mean that my preparation at school a quarter of a century ago would have been adequate to this examination as it is now. On the other hand, I should have no hope whatever of a creditable degree on the same pretence. The schoolboy of those days was ready for the university of today, but his undergraduate contemporary would find a great many of the questions in a modern tripos literally incomprehensible. In other words, while a multitude of ideas have not only been developed in the most highly specialised mathematics during this generation but have permeated mathematical thought to the extent that every educated mathematician knows something of them, the schoolboy is not, as far as I can discover, expected to have a single idea with which his father was not familiar.

Professor E H Neville played an active part in the formulation and execution of the table-making activities of the British Association Mathematical Tables Committee. He was chairman during its more active years from 1931 to 1947, when the series of B.A. Mathematical Tables, Volumes I-IX and Part-volumes A and B - inspired largely by Dr L J Comrie, Secretary of the Committee from 1929 to 1937 - was produced. The part played by the Chairman was visible only in his lively and well-phrased prefaces to several of the volumes. It is thus very fitting that the Royal Society Mathematical Tables - successors to the British Association Mathematical Tables should start with two volumes by Neville.

[Dorothy Wrinch] and Neville served together on the Mathematical Tables Committee. Their thirty-one year love affair, if that's what it was, began in her annus horribilis, 1930, the year of John's implosion. She never loved Neville as he loved her, but he would be the one, perhaps the only one, for whom she didn't wear a mask of gaiety. Her letters to Erice, as she almost always spelled his name, are filled with fears, frustrations, and worries; his with love and advice. ... Time and again Neville set his own work aside to give her a hand: "The author offers her thanks to E H Neville for his advice and criticism;" "Reproduced by kind permission of Prof E H Neville, University of Reading, England, who kindly constructed this model."

... and she was the complete foil to the idiosyncrasies of his genius. As host and hostess, they were unsurpassed in my experience and many others share this opinion ...

The high regard in which he was held by the British pedagogical community was reflected in his election in 1932 as a member of the Central Committee of International Commission on Mathematical Instruction, on which he served with Hadamard as President and Fehr as Secretary General. He was re-elected in 1936.

On the fringes of philosophy, mathematics is deplorably Arician: the aspirant to a throne must slay the reigning monarch. If elsewhere our subject is more civilised, this is not to say that individually we are crushed under the weight of all the knowledge that our predecessors have acquired; we do not refute their arguments, but we do not share their enthusiasms. Nor do we expect our own favourite studies to have peculiar longevity merely because they are ours. The calculus of extension has almost as few admirers today as the Greek classification of quadratic surds, and Dupin's cyclides are following Robert Tucker's circles into oblivion. But the flux is not quite universal; there are some theories and some theorems, we are sure, which must always be as important as they are to us. We cannot doubt that in the most distant future every student of mathematics will be familiar with some form of Rolle's theorem, with Cauchy's theorem, with Pascal's theorem, with Fejer's form of Fourier's theorem, with Lagrange's equations, with a theory of incommensurables into which the Greek theory is in some sense incorporated, and with the properties of the circular functions. Thirty-five years ago my contemporaries would have included in any such list the elements of the theory of the Jacobian elliptic functions; it never crossed our minds that the time would come when the ordinary mathematical undergraduate was to know less of these functions than we did. We were wrong, but it was not the accepted estimate of the functions that was mistaken. If interest in the functions has lapsed and facility with them is an old-fashioned virtue, reasons are not hard to find, but they are reasons which should not be allowed to persist.

... a painful illness and prolonged convalescence in 1940 gave Neville time to write a long-meditated volume on Jacobian elliptic functions ...

Books indeed were his passion. He had an admirable mathematical library, full of rare and choice items; the collection of texts on elliptic functions is almost certainly complete. But his tastes were catholic; books of all kinds filled every corner of his house, and first editions of his favourite authors, such as Lewis Carroll and H G Wells were eagerly sought. Your bedside reading could be anything from Bayle's 'Dictionary' to the latest Agatha Christie.

Neville was a strong swimmer and received an award from the Royal Humane Society for his gallant rescue of a child from the flooded Cam on a winter's day. Weak eyesight prevented him from playing games, but he would watch and discuss cricket and football as keenly as he would watch and discuss Molière or Shaw; and at bridge a casual manner masked a devastating brilliance. ... Neville's logical skill made him a dangerous opponent in an argument, but a natural tolerance prevented him from dogmatising or attempting to impose his own firmly-held opinions and beliefs on others.

No one can ever estimate the effect which Mrs Neville's death had upon E H, but those of us who knew him closely have the feeling that he never reconciled himself fully to her passing. ... E H, himself, was taken ill in the early days of August 1961 and passed away in hospital in Reading, being unconscious for most of the time.