Reo Fortune

Reo Franklin Fortune (1903 to 1979) was a New Zealand-born social anthropologist, trained first as a psychologist, whom the atlas holds for one contribution to mathematics: his study of Fortunate numbers in number theory. His working life was international. He was a student of Alfred Cort Haddon, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, taught at Lingnan University in China from 1937 to 1939, worked in Toledo, Ohio, and at the University of Toronto, served as government anthropologist in Burma in 1946 and 1947, and from 1947 to 1971 was a lecturer at Cambridge specialising in Melanesian language and culture. He was first married to Margaret Mead, with whom he did field studies in New Guinea from 1931 to 1933, and he became well known for his 1932 book The Sorcerers of Dobu.