Next up in the Led Zep collection is the late John Bonham. He's going to…
Professor John Wilson
Allow me to present Professor John Stuart Wilson. Our first pure maths supervisor and the guy that dragged us all kicking and screaming from freewheeling A level pure maths into the rigorous world of university pure maths. It was a painful process, I can tell you, but we made it through. He was also an excellent university lecturer: I attended his course on vector spaces. His specialist area in maths, though, is group theory; this means that our paths diverged from about midway through my second year. He’s actually quite a gentle soul at heart. I remember a conversation with him at a mathy dinner when he was struggling to get over to me the beauty that there was in pure maths. If we had the same conversation today, knowing all that I know now, I’d be firing back with the beauty in applied maths: the way that expected return in equities disappears in the Merton-Black-Scholes theory, the way that a weird solution that Paul Dirac found to a differential equation led him to predict the existence of antimatter, that sort of thing.
Anyway, like Doctor Maunder a couple of days ago, Doctor John is really into his classical music. He’s actually a composer, which you have to respect, and which I’ve reflected in those musical notes hovering over the portrait.
Did I say Doctor John? That’s how we all referred to him behind his back. Someone spotted a letter in Private Eye about herpes that had been sent in by someone calling themselves Doctor John and they wondered whether it was our pure maths supervisor. And the name just stuck.
Anyway, about the portrait. I was working from a black and white photo, so decided to start off with grey tones. I thought this would bring out some of the white highlights in his hair but it also clashes against the personality of someone who only (mathematically) believed in black and white, with nothing in between. I added a few proper flesh tones to the greys later on. And I added a dark background, which helped me improve the shape of his chin.
Likeness-wise, if you cover up the mouth, the eyes and hair are unmistakeable. The mouth isn’t quite right though. Probably a mistake to have him smiling.
This one will be included in the Christ’s Maths Fellows 1982-86 collection. The collection will be put up for sale but is too niche for there to be any reasonable likelihood of it selling.
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