Dominic Welsh memorial service

To Oxford last Saturday for the memorial service for Dominic Welsh.

I wrote about Dominic here; the picture was taken at Geoff Whittle’s conference in Wellington in December 2015, if my memory serves.

Many people’s lives were touched by Dominic, and it was good to see so many able to make it for the service. It was basically a happy affair, celebrating the life of a good person, despite our grief.

The Bible reading, the famous 13th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, was read by Bridget. The Merton choir sang beautifully an anthem by William Byrd. There were four addresses, two from former Merton undergraduates who had become close friends with Dominic and his family (Sir Brian Leveson and Sir Howard Stringer), one from a family member (his granddaughter Zoë), and one from his DPhil student Colin McDiarmid.

I was very glad that Colin was able to speak about Dominic’s mathematics, since I think of him as first of all a mathematician. Colin described three major phases in his mathematical life (percolation, matroid theory, and computational complexity), with a late flowering on phylogenetic trees. He also described Dominic’s important and influential books. Perhaps out of modesty, he didn’t speak about Dominic’s students, perhaps his most significant contribution to the mathematical world, so I won’t say any more either.

For me the day was made totally memorable by two extraordinary coincidences.

Tea and cakes were provided after the service (up to the usual Merton standard), and I found myself talking to a group of people who had been mathematics undergaduates in the 1970s and whom I had also taught. One of these was Chris Palmer. He told me that after his undergraduate degree he had done his PhD in Chapel Hill. My ears pricked up since I knew that Rosemary had been in Chapel Hill at about the same time. Indeed, it turned out that she had also taught him there!

The other surprise happened earlier. When we arrived at Oxford station, we decided to use the toilets in the small waiting room on Platform 4. I discovered that there were a few shelves of books for sale for charity there. Closer inspection showed that, among the frothy novels, were three weightier mathematics books: Kenneth Bogart’s book on combinatorics, and two books on experimental design. We looked inside the thicker one, and to our amazement discovered that the previous owner (probably the only one, certainly the only one to have put his name in the book) was Donald Preece. Now Rosemary and I had both first met Donald in the early 1970s, in completely different contexts (me at the British Combinatorial Conference in Aberystwyth in 1973, where we began a collaboration which I have told about here, and Rosemary in Edinburgh where he was a kind of mentor to her and taught her things like “data sniffing”). Donald died about ten years ago; how the book got from his house in Kent (I suppose) to Oxford Station, and where it had been on its journey, I have absolutely no idea!