Crispin Nash-Williams

Crispin Nash-Williams, in full Crispin St John Alvah Nash-Williams, was a Welsh mathematician born in Cardiff in 1932 who worked in discrete mathematics and especially graph theory. He was the son of an archaeologist at the National Museum of Wales, was schooled at Rugby, and graduated as Senior Wrangler from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1953. He researched under Shaun Wylie and Davis Rees, spent 1956 to 1957 at Princeton where Norman Steenrod influenced him, and received his Cambridge doctorate in 1959 for a thesis of over five hundred pages on decomposing graphs into infinite chains. His colleague Hilton counts him among the founders of graph theory as a serious subject and lists Hamiltonian cycles, Eulerian graphs, spanning trees, the marriage problem, detachments, reconstruction and infinite graphs as recurring themes of his papers. He had a particular liking for infinite graphs. He died at Ascot in 2001.