MacTutor
John Joseph O'Connor
Quick Info
Luton, Bedfordshire, England
Biography
John O'Connor's father was Wilfred O'Connor (1908-1985) who was born in Lincoln, England. His mother was Kathleen Meehan (1907-1979) from Tulla, County Clare, Ireland. Wilfred was apprenticed to a chemist and druggist in Lincoln and after passing the exams of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain [17] he qualified as a pharmacist. He took a partnership with a chemist and druggist in Luton, Bedfordshire and eventually took over this business. He also passed the examinations of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers [23] so he could practise as an optician. He carried on working as a pharmacist until 1978. Kathleen Meehan came to Luton from Ireland in about 1930 to join other members of her family who were already in England. She worked as a secretary at the SKEFCO ball-bearing factory in Luton. Wilfred and Kathleen married in 1942. They had three sons: John, the subject of this biography (born 1945), Denis (born 1947) and Hugh (born 1950).O'Connor grew up in Stopsley, which is a suburb on the Northern edge of Luton. He went to primary school in Stopsley and from the age of eight went to St Michael's College in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, which was about six miles away. St Michael's was a Roman Catholic School which was run by a French-based teaching order. [21] It served as the Catholic secondary school for a wide catchment area in both Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. It was about a 20 minute bus journey from Stopsley. O'Connor was lucky that when he was in the fifth form (aged about 15) the priest who had been his mathematics teacher was replaced by an Irishman called Mr McHugh who was on the verge of retirement. He was an eccentric enthusiast, one of whose tricks was to stand with is back to the blackboard and, without looking, draw a perfect chalk circle. McHugh encouraged O'Connor to press ahead of the rest of the class and introduced him to calculus. From then on O'Connor was mainly interested in following mathematics rather than his other subjects.
In 1963 he won an open scholarship to Oxford to study mathematics. In the nine months between leaving school and taking up his place at university he worked in the National Chemical Laboratory in Teddington, London (part of the National Physical Laboratory site). He worked with a group who measured specific heats of chemical substances from absolute zero up to room temperature. [4] His job mainly involved doing calculations on electric desk-calculating machines and in preparing data to be submitted to the valve-operated computer DEUCE which was still being used at the NPL site. This sparked a continuing interest in computers.
He started at St Catherine's College, Oxford [20] in 1964. This was a newly opened college in striking new buildings designed by the Danish architect Arne Jacobson. Building work was still going on when O'Connor joined the college. He was tutored by John N Crossley (born 1937), Alan B Tayler (1931-1995), Graeme Segal (born 1941), John Ockendon (born 1940) and briefly by Terry Wall. In his final year he became interested in algebraic topology and attended lectures by Brian Steer. He did well enough as an undergraduate to be allowed to stay on to do his doctorate. He was supervised by Graeme Segal, and for part of a year by Wilson Sutherland (1935-2019). His thesis title was Stable Equivariant Homotopy Theory and he showed how the equivariant analogue of the stable homotopy of spheres could be reduced to a cobordism problem.
In 1969 O'Connor married Jean Cridland (1941-2019) from Philadelphia, USA, whom he had originally met in France when she was on her way back from teaching English in Turkey with the US Peace Corps. She was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia and was a teacher of French and Spanish. They had four children: Paul (born 1973), Elspeth (born 1976), Helen (born 1978) and James (born 1980).
In 1970 O'Connor was appointed a lecturer in the Pure Mathematics Department of the University of St Andrews at the same time that John Howie took over from Edward Copson as the Regius professor of mathematics. St Andrews only had about 3000 students at that time and O'Connor was give the freedom to lecture on a variety of advanced topics to small but talented groups of honours students as well as learning how to teach larger groups of younger undergraduates. His interests moved away from topology and more towards the area of computational algebra.
In 1988 an initiative in teaching mathematics on computers was started. With the assistance of Edmund Robertson and other colleagues O'Connor developed a system of computer learning christened MacTutor (because it was implemented on Apple Macintosh computers). As well as containing the usual facilities for plotting functions, sitting quizzes, etc. it included some ingenious ideas for exploring different areas of mathematics. This system won various awards from sponsors as varied as British Nuclear Fuels and the US Department of Agriculture (though in the latter case the money attached to the prize was not received when the Americans discovered that St Andrews was not in the USA).
In 1994 the MacTutor software was entered for the European Academic Software Award. The part of the system which already contained large amounts of historical content was adapted to appear as a resource on the newly-developed World Wide Web. MacTutor won the 1994 EASA and one of the things which most impressed the judges in Heidelberg -- as well as the other mathematicians competing for the prize -- was this historical material on the Web. At that time there was little other such material available on the Web and so O'Connor and Robertson were encouraged to expand it further.
For more information about the beginnings of MacTutor, see THIS LINK.
Let us give some quotes from articles about MacTutor. The Merlot review in 2002 states [10]:-
This site is a rich and growing source of materials pertaining to the history of mathematics including biographies of mathematicians, mathematics in various cultures, time lines, famous curves (with Java interactivity), overview of math history, in-depth coverage of a large number of history topics, and more. Individual pages contain many cross-links and material is well written and useful for both casual and experienced users.Barnabas Hughes writes in 2007 [8]:-
John J O'Connor and Edmund F Robertson of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews deserve the thanks of every teacher of mathematics who wishes to interest oneself or one's students in the history of mathematics.Tony Mann writes in 2011 [15]:-
Mention must be made of the outstanding Web resource on the history of mathematics, the MacTutor archive, created and maintained by two mathematicians, John J O'Connor and Edmund F Robertson, at the University of St Andrews. This currently includes 2,118 biographies and over 4,000 pictures of mathematicians. It records about 2 million file accesses each week, which reflects its use worldwide. Such a reach must have been unimaginable when MacTutor was first conceived. There is no doubt that much of the work now taking place in the history of mathematics would be impossible without this archive: the use of history of mathematics in education, at the school and the undergraduate level, is so greatly facilitated by MacTutor that I believe the growth in interest in history in mathematics education could not have occurred without the archive.Daniel Ashlock writes in 2020 [1]:-
... mathematics is the passport to a larger, richer world. The archive of mathematical biographies can make this real for students who have not yet mastered their first deeper mathematics. If you are a teacher, the MacTutor archive is a wonderful resource for enriching a maths class, for final written projects, and to give students a sense of the reach and scope of mathematics. You can simply have the students browse the archives, or you can use it to create ten-minute segments for class about interesting people.The MacTutor history archive has won a number of awards including the Hirst Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2015.
A list of some of the awards won by the MacTutor archive is at THIS LINK.
For more information about the award of the Hirst Prize to O'Connor and Robertson, see THIS LINK
O'Connor became a Senior Lecturer in 1992 and retired from teaching in 2010. He and Robertson continue their work on MacTutor. In 2020, following the unease of the university authorities that MacTutor could be vulnerable to interference from outside, O'Connor cooperated with David J Ferguson, a talented computer science undergraduate working on a summer project, to transfer MacTutor to a more secure platform using a system called Lektor.
References (show)
- D Ashlock, MacTutor: Biographical History of Math, Occupy Math (27 August 2020).
https://occupymath.wordpress.com/2020/08/27/mactutor-biographical-history-of-math/ - M Breckon, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, Reference Reviews 30 (1) (2016), 27-28.
- C Colm, MacTutor History of Mathematics website creators honoured by LMS, The Aperiodical (19 July 2015).
https://aperiodical.com/category/columns/maths-colm/#:~:text=MacTutor%20History%20of%20Mathematics%20website%20creators%20honoured%20by%20LMS&text=Edmund%20Robertson%20%26%20John%20O%27Connor,Andrews. - J F Counsell et al., Thermodynamic properties of phosphorus compounds, Transactions of the Faraday Society 59 (1963) 2845-2850
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/1963/tf/tf9635902702 - E Dunne, Links with the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, American Mathematical Society (6 November 2016).
https://blogs.ams.org/beyondreviews/2016/11/06/links-with-the-mactutor-history-of-mathematics-archive/ - MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, Knowledge Quest; Chicago 27 (3) (1999), 46.
- B Hughes, St Andrews History of Mathematics Archive, Convergence (July 2007).
- B Hughes, St Andrews History of Mathematics Archive, Mathematical Association of America (2007).
https://maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/st-andrews-history-of-mathematics-archive - London Mathematical Society Hirst Prize and Lectureship, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews (30 June 2015).
https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/mathematics-statistics/news/title-97419-en.php - MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, Merlot (19 July 2002).
https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewCompositeReview.htm?id=163304 - MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, Applied Math and Science Education Repository (2008).
https://amser.org/r6518/the_mactutor_history_of_mathematics_archive - MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, Academic Accelerator (2015).
https://academic-accelerator.com/encyclopedia/mactutor-history-of-mathematics-archive - MacTutor (MT) History of Mathematics Archive, Internet Scout (12 July 1996).
https://archives.internetscout.org/r573/mactutor_mt_history_of_mathematics_archive - MacTutor History of Mathematics: General Relativity, Physical Sciences Resource Center (1 May 1996).
https://psrc.aapt.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=5146 - T Mann, History of Mathematics and History of Science, Isis 102 (2011), 518-526.
- P Neumann, The Inaugural LMS Hirst Lecture, London Mathematical Society Newsletter 459 (2016), 12-13.
- Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain
https://www.rpharms.com/about-us/history-of-the-society - Records of Proceedings at LMS Meetings. Inaugural Hirst Lecture and Ordinary Meetings: 20 April 2016, London Mathematical Society Newsletter 459 (2016), 22,
- L D Steele, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, Canadian Review of Materials 3 (17) (April 1997).
https://www.cmreviews.ca/cm/vol3/no17/mathtutor.html - St Catherine's College, Oxford
https://www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/about-us/ - St Michael's College, Hitchin
https://stmichaelshitchin.wordpress.com/ - The MacTutor Archive, ThatsMaths (1 January 2015).
https://thatsmaths.com/2015/01/01/the-mactutor-archive/ - Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers
https://www.spectaclemakers.com/
Additional Resources (show)
Other pages about John O'Connor:
Other websites about John O'Connor:
Honours (show)
Honours awarded to John O'Connor
Cross-references (show)
Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update March 2024
Last Update March 2024