 Dr R J Thomas, Dr A J Willmott, Dr A B Haynes, Prof I C Pyle (HoD).jpg)
John Willmott: an obituary
Dr John Willmott died on 2 January 2023 after a short illness.
John was appointed to the university’s first lectureship in Computation, taking up the post in March 1968 having previously been a lecturer at UMIST. His early recollections of being appointed to and working at York can be seen in a document he wrote in 2010.
John supervised the department’s first PhD students, including Alan Burns, and taught modules in Numerical Methods and Numerical Analysis when Computer Science was still just a subsidiary of degrees in Mathematics, Physics or Biology. John was a member of the first Board of Studies in Computer Science, and a recipient of one the department’s earliest research grants, £15,310 awarded by the SRC to investigate “Numerical modelling of thermal regenerators”.
John retired in 1998, but was a frequent visitor to, and retained a desk in, the department for a number of years after that. He will be much missed by those who knew him.