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:
“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
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“Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)