Ivor Etherington

Ivor Malcolm Haddon Etherington (1908 to 1994) was a British mathematician who worked first on general relativity and later on genetics, where he introduced genetic algebras. He was born in Lewisham, London, the posthumous son of a Baptist missionary, was educated at Mill Hill School and the University of Oxford, and took his doctorate as a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh, where he later became a professor of mathematics. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1934 and won the Society's Keith Medal for 1955 to 1957. His early paper on the distance between two particles in general relativity was thought worthy of republication seventy-four years after it first appeared, and his non-associative algebra thesis earned him a D.Sc. in 1941. His name is on Etherington's reciprocity theorem and the Wedderburn-Etherington number. His doctoral students include Henryk Minc. He retired in 1974 to Easdale on the Scottish west coast and died there in 1994; during the Second World War he and his wife sheltered thirty-two German refugees.