Robert Woodrow

A brief interruption to this sequence of posts: I learned this morning from Gena Hahn that Robert Woodrow is dead.

Robert was a good person, with a wide circle of friends. He was a good person, generous and with a sense of humour. He was one of the very few people of my acquaintance who could do a spell in University administration without going over to the dark side.

Robert and I go back quite a long way. It was his paper on Henson’s triangle-free graph that showed me that Fraïssé theory was a rich source of interesting permutation groups. (The stabiliser of a vertex in Henson’s triangle-free graph acts highly transitively on its neighbours.)

I first met Robert at a conference in Montréal in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I don’t actually recall precisely. There were several such conferences; on one of them, Robert and I visited Québec City; on another, we had a memorable trip to Mont Tremblant National Park, which gave me a story I dined out on for many years afterwards.

I was at the special session of the CMS winter meeting in Vancouver a few years ago for his birthday, and met him again when I visited Calgary to give the Louise and Richard Guy Lecture. On that occasion, Robert was a wonderful host, taking Rosemary and me to Banff (where we went up in the gondola to the top of Table Mountain) and also to the Alberta Badlands (where we couldn’t get into the dinosaur museum but saw the world’s largest dinosaur). On the way back from the latter, Robert pointed out the village where he went to primary school; his country primary school was probably rather like mine.

Goodbye Robert. We miss you deeply.