Dominic Welsh

Dominic Welsh died late last week.

Dominic and I were tutors at Merton College, Oxford for nearly eleven years. I was the pure maths tutor and he was the applied maths tutor. But there was no other Oxford college where the mathematical interests of the pure and applied maths tutors were closer. College lunches are an opportunity to talk to colleagues in other areas; Dominic and I broke this convention to some extent by discussing our research, though he was in no way an antisocial mathematician!

He had a very great impact on the subject. Much of this came from his provocative conjectures, but the main influence was through his students. Take a look at the Mathematical Genealogy page: his students include Adrian Bondy, Peter Donnelly, Graham Farr, Geoff Grimmett, Colin McDiarmid, Criel Merino, James Oxley, Ken Regan, and David Stirzaker.

Among other things, he was the second chair of the British Combinatorial Committee, my predecessor-but-one in this role.