Background
Nash-Williams was born on 19 December 1932 in Cardiff, Wales. His father, Victor Erle Nash-Williams, was an archaeologist at University College Cardiff, and his mother had studied classics at Oxford University.
Nash-Williams was born on 19 December 1932 in Cardiff, Wales. His father, Victor Erle Nash-Williams, was an archaeologist at University College Cardiff, and his mother had studied classics at Oxford University.
He continued his studies for a year at Princeton University, with Norman Steenrod. All three of Wylie, Rees, and Steenrod are listed as the supervisors of his Doctor of Philosophy dissertation. He finished his dissertation in 1958, but before doing so he returned to the United Kingdom as an assistant lecturer at the University of Aberdeen.
His research interest was in the field of discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. After studying mathematics at Cambridge University, earning the title of Senior Wrangler in 1953, he remained for his graduate studies at Cambridge, studying under the supervision of Shaun Wylie and David Rees. He kept his position at Aberdeen through ten years and two promotions until 1967, when he moved to the University of Waterloo and became one of the three faculty members in the newly formed Department of Combinatorics there.
In 1972 he returned to Aberdeen, as Professor of Pure Mathematics.
In 1975 he moved to the University of Reading, where he took the chair previously held by Richard Rado, who had been one of his dissertation examiners.