Christopher Zeeman

Christopher Zeeman (Erik Christopher Zeeman, 1925 to 2016) was a British mathematician known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory, and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of Warwick. He was born in Yokohama, Japan, to a Danish father and an English mother and grew up in England. He served as a Flying Officer and navigator in the Royal Air Force from 1943 to 1947, then studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in 1953 for a thesis titled Dihomology, written under Shaun Wylie. He died at Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The Zeeman conjecture, which asks whether the product of a finite contractible two-dimensional complex with an interval is collapsible, is named after him.