Development
Cooper was born in Beaufort West, Wester Cape, South Africa. Following the death of his father in 1919, the family moved to Cape Town where he attended the South African College School. His ability was soon recognized and he was encouraged to become a rabbi. However he rejected the Jewish faith and instead studied mathematics and physics at the University of Cape Town, where he won the Governor General’s prize for pure mathematics. He took an active part in student politics becoming a socialist member of the Student’s Parliament, with strong views against racism and Nazism.
He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and started to study at Queen's College in 1935, obtaining his D.Phil. in 1940 under the supervision of Edward Charles Titchmarsh. His work made an immediate impact and as early as January 1939 he was invited to speak at Hadamard’s seminar in the Collège de France.
While in Oxford he joined the Communist party, where he met his future wife Kathleen Dixon. Turned down for active service due to his poor eyesight, he worked for the Bristol Aeroplane Company from 1940 to 1944. During this time he became disenchanted with Russia’s non-aggression pact with the Nazis and left the Communist party.
Read more about this topic: Lionel Cooper (mathematician)
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Understanding child development takes the emphasis away from the child’s character—looking at the child as good or bad. The emphasis is put on behavior as communication. Discipline is thus seen as problem-solving. The child is helped to learn a more acceptable manner of communication.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)