Harry Pitt

Sir Harry Raymond Pitt (1914 to 2005) was a British mathematician, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was born in West Bromwich and educated at King Edward's School, Stourbridge, and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was awarded a Cambridge PhD in 1938 for research on Tauberian theorems, which gave him a lasting interest in probability theory, and spent about a year at Harvard as a Choate Memorial Fellow. During the Second World War he worked at the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He became Professor of Mathematics at Queen's University of Belfast in 1945 and Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Nottingham in 1950, where he later supervised the statistician Clive Granger. From 1964 to 1978 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading, and he was knighted in 1978.