Renfrey Potts

Renfrey Burnard Potts, known as Ren, was an Australian mathematician born in Adelaide in 1925 who is best known for the Potts model, a generalization of the Ising model of interacting spins. He studied at the University of Adelaide, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and took his D.Phil. there in 1951 under Cyril Domb. He later held a chair of applied mathematics at Adelaide and worked in operations research, networks, transportation science, car-following and road traffic, difference equations and robotics, and he won the Lanchester Prize for operations research in 1959. He also oversaw the first computer purchases at the University of Adelaide.