Jim Murray

Title

Vignettes from a Mathematician’s Odyssey in the Real World         

Abstract

I shall briefly describe a spectrum of research problems such as pilot ejection injuries, two phase flow theory and how it possibly explains moon crater formation, why sea snakes do not get the bends and its relevance to carbon monoxide poisoning, benefits of cannibalism, the Everglade crocodilia’s worry about global warming, how the alligator put genetics in its place, divorce prediction and maybe others.

Short bio

After finishing my Ph.D. a year early in St. Andrew’s I started my peripatetic academic career between America and England. In the mid-1960s, at the University of Michigan, I decided to start working in biomedical fields which I found much more interesting and useful in the world, although I still occasionally dabbled on a variety of odd problems I simply found interesting. I ended up in Oxford (the second tenured position I had there) in 1969 and on retiring a few years early in 1992 (to get away from administration hassles) I spent some very enjoyable years at the University of Washington and recently some years, until 2018, as a Senior Scholar in Mathematics at Princeton University.