Patrick Michael Grundy

Patrick Michael Grundy (16 November 1917 in Yarmouth, Isle of Wight to 4 November 1959) was an English mathematician and statistician and one of the eponymous co-discoverers of the Sprague-Grundy function and its application to the analysis of a wide class of combinatorial games. He received his secondary education at Malvern College, to which he had won a Major Scholarship in 1931, graduated in 1935 and won three prizes in mathematics there. He then entered Clare College, Cambridge, on a Foundation Scholarship and read for the Mathematical Tripos from 1936 to 1939, earning first class honours in Part II and a distinction in Part III. The work for which he is best known appeared in his first paper, Mathematics and Games, first published in the Cambridge University Mathematical Society magazine Eureka in 1939.