Born on Valentine’s day, 1946, part of the post-war baby boom, and raised and schooled in Sunderland in the north east of England.  My first University was Surrey, where I read mathematics.  After graduating in 1971, and after a brief spell of school teaching, I started my first doctorate (in mathematics) at Newcastle University.  In the middle of my PhD I got married and, almost immediately, my wife and I left for Africa where I took up a three-year lectureship at the University of Botswana.  I completed my maths PhD on my return to England and then left for the USA to take up an Andrew Mellon fellowship at Pittsburgh University. (For reasons too complicated to explain, this also involved getting a PhD in physics).  Then the usual run of academic jobs, including fellowships and lectureships at York University, Canterbury University (New Zealand) and Leeds University, and the birth of my two children.

In 1986 I was offered a lectureship at Linkoping University (Sweden) that eventually turned into a full professorship.  However, during a sabbatical year in York in 2000 I suddenly decided to take up painting instead of mathematical physics.  This was not as difficult as it might sound, as I found that I had a natural affinity with painting (I suspect that artists and mathematicians, who usually think in terms of pictures, use the same part of the brain).  I was also encouraged by the success – almost all my paintings were sold – of my first small exhibition in York.

I now paint practically full-time, apart from a small amount of teaching at York University - no more than a couple of courses a year.

I have over forty research articles to my name as well as a book on relativity and cosmology (‘General Relativity’, published by Cambridge University press, 1999).