Stanley Skewes was part of the first wave of students to gain a fully South African university education when he graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in civil engineering in 1920 and a master's in 1922. Universities had existed in the country before this, but they had really only been outposts of British ones. This started to change in the early 1900s when a movement towards establishing a university for the purpose of teaching, as opposed to giving examinations and conferring degrees, began, and led to the University of Cape Town becoming a university in its own right in 1918. Thanks to this movement, knowledge production in South Africa started to become more home-grown. South African mathematicians who travelled to England to study returned with degrees and began teaching at the higher institutions in Cape Town and Johannesburg. These universities and colleges became home to talented mathematicians, and scientific knowledge spread to the wider population through various programmes on the radio.

In the Department of Pure Mathematics, teaching loomed far larger than research. The numerous undergraduate classes were not only filled by engineering and surveying students but also by future schoolteachers, applied chemists, actuaries, accountants, and businessmen. ... Until 1923 there were only two professors in the department, Lawrence (Lawrie) Crawford (1867-1951), who had assumed his chair in 1899, and Thomas Parkes Kent (1871-1923). Crawford was instrumental for the College to obtain the university status. As a teacher, his vigour was boundless. ... Kent was certainly more innovative, and his early death in 1923 threw the department into some disarray. Crawford insisted that he will be replaced with a senior lectureship and a lectureship. Andries Charles Cilliers (1898-1980) was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1925, but he only stayed five months before moving to Stellenbosch University. His successor was Stanley Skewes (1899-1988), who remained at UCT for about forty years. The lecturer's position was filled up in 1925 by Miss G M Pagan (later Mrs Wylie), named "Pancy" because of her penchant for brightly-coloured clothing, a 28-year-old specialist in actuarial mathematics.

Stanley Skewes, who had returned to the University of Cape Town from King's College, Cambridge, in 1926 showed an awareness of contemporary trends in mathematics and this he proceeded to demonstrate by updating the content of senior courses, "throwing out a whole lot of stuff I regarded as fool's stuff," he recalled with satisfaction later.

... you made the mistake of talking to me about [the Riemann Hypothesis] from time to time when you were rowing two and I at bow until eventually I thought I had better find out what it was all about.

Let π(x) be the number of primes less than x, and let $li(x)$ denote as usual the "logarithmic integral"

          $\int _{0}^{x}$ $\Large\frac{dx}{\log x}\normalsize$.

The "prime number theorem" states that

          $lim_{x\rightarrow ∞} \Large\frac{\pi(x)}{li(x)}\normalsize = 1$.

Numerical evidence suggests that $\Large\frac{\pi(x)}{li(x)}\normalsize$ tends to unity from below, so that

         $\pi(x)-li(x) < 0$.

Littlewood has proved, however, that the number

         $P(x) = \pi(x)-li(x)$

actually changes sign infinitely often as x increases to infinity.

Ingham has pointed out that Littlewood's method provides, even in principle, no definite number $x_{0}$, such as a repeated exponential like $9^{9^{9}}$, before which $P(x)$ has changed sign. My object is to obtain, assuming the truth of the Riemann hypothesis, such a number $x_{0}$; that is to obtain an $x_{0}$ such that, for some $x ≤ x_{0}$, the inequality $P(x) > 0$ is satisfied. I prove, in fact, that

          $10^{10^{10^{34}}}$

is such a number.

What would be more important, it is possible that the restriction of the Riemann hypothesis can be removed. I propose, therefore, to postpone the details to a later paper ...

... proved quite unfitted to teach undergraduates, pitching his lectures way beyond their comprehension ... By the end of 1940 students were in uproar, the Pure Mathematics staff at a loss to make good their professor's deficiencies and the University unsure how, in the midst of World War II, to replace a chairholder who was brilliant as a researcher but an unmitigated failure as a teacher and administrator. At a round-table meeting with Young early in 1941 chaired by the Principal, Brown of Applied Mathematics warned that, with regard to the Department of Pure Mathematics, he rather "fears the future." As a result, a compromise was arranged extending Young's probationary period as professor, relieving him of most undergraduate teaching which was assigned to a hastily-appointed additional lecturer and making Skewes responsible for the daily running of the department. "He handed it all over to me and said, 'You do it' and then he went on with his mathematics," recounted Skewes ruefully.

I wish in conclusion to express my humble thanks to Professor Littlewood, but for whose patient profanity this paper could never have become fit for publication.

Jack de Wet completed his BSc degree in electrical engineering in 1933, and he was awarded the Corporation Silver and Gold Medals as the top student for the third and fourth years respectively. However, he could not ignore his natural affinity for and love of mathematics, and so in 1934 - his fifth year at the University of Cape Town - he enrolled in the Faculty of Science for a BSc degree, with a double major in Applied Mathematics and Pure Mathematics. In these two separate but cognate departments Jack was inspired by two excellent scholars, Alexander Brown and Stanley Skewes, to make mathematics and theoretical physics his life-long interests. ... For Jack de Wet in 1934 there was the 'magic of the spark that leaps from one soul to another': the fine mentorship of Sandy Brown and Stanley Skewes.

Later in his life, Gerhard spoke of the great debt he owed Stanley Skewes, a lecturer (and later professor) in the mathematics department at Cape Town, who taught him in his undergraduate years and subsequently became his primary advisor and supporter. Skewes recommended him for a position as a junior lecturer in pure mathematics, which enabled him to continue his studies from 1937 to 1938, and encouraged him to apply to the mathematics department at Princeton for further graduate work. When Gerhard sailed for America in the summer of 1938, Skewes saw him off. Gerhard remembered Skewes standing at the pier, calling out his final words of advice: "Never doubt your own abilities."

In the Department of Mathematics Coetzee studied under the remarkable Professor Douglas Sears, who patiently taught his students not only mathematics but also how to be mathematicians. In mathematical logic his lecturer was Stanley Skewes, an outstanding mathematician who had worked with the famous A M Turing. Skewes was a helpful and lovable person, and highly regarded on account of his important 'Skewes number' article of 1933. He was without affectation, but did not suffer fools gladly. ... In January 1960 Professor S Skewes of the Department of Mathematics wrote a testimonial praising Coetzee's abilities and hard work. He had passed in the first class in five of the ten courses for which he had enrolled. Skewes knew that Coetzee, who had in his second year easily achieved a first-class pass in pure mathematics, had in 1959 been handicapped by having had to follow another first-year course in addition to English III and Pure Mathematics III.

Prof S Skewes, a former Secretary of the Society in 1930, received a warm welcome.

Agreed that no Entrance Fee would be required from Prof S Skewes, a former member and one time Secretary of the Society.