List of Old Mancunians - Mathematicians

Mathematicians

• Sir Michael Francis Atiyah (1929-) is a prolific geometer who studied at the school for two years as preparation for Cambridge. He went on to attain a Fields Medal, the Abel Prize and the Order of Merit, as well as the positions of President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity, his former college.
• Clifford Cocks and Malcolm J. Williamson were peers at the school and also Maths students at Cambridge. They achieved silver and gold medals respectively at the 1968 IMO in Moscow while studying at MGS. They both went on to become cryptographers at GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, dealing with security of communications. While both made their own contributions to cryptography in the mid 70s, their results were considered national secrets and when they were discovered independently (about four years later in both cases) they received no credit for their work. It was only in 1997 that GCHQ chose to reveal their achievements. Clifford Cocks had developed RSA encryption, used in all online commerce, but named after the three men who first published the work; likewise, Malcolm J. Williamson had developed what is now known as Diffie-Hellman key exchange, a cryptographic key-agreement protocol, named after the original publishers of the work.
• Jonathan Mestel (1957-) is an applied mathematician at Imperial College who works on magnetohydrodynamics and biological fluid dynamics. He was the first person to be awarded chess International Grandmaster titles by FIDE in both over-the-board play and problem solving.
• Edmund Taylor Whittaker (1873–1956) also went on to study at Trinity settling at Edinburgh to make significant contributions to Mathematical Physics.