Cassels was educated at Neville"s Cross Council School in Durham and George Heriot"s School in Edinburgh. He went on to study at the University of Edinburgh and graduated with an undergraduate Master of Arts (Master of Arts) degree in 1943. After the war he became a research student of Louis Mordell at Trinity College, Cambridge.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1949 and was elected a fellow of Trinity in the same year.
His academic career was interrupted in World World War II when he was involved in cryptography at Bletchley Park. Cassels then spent a year lecturing in mathematics at the University of Manchester before returning to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1950. He was appointed Reader in Arithmetic in 1963, the same year he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London.
In 1967 he was appointed as Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge.
In 1969 he became Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. He retired in 1984.
He initially worked on elliptic curves.
After a period when he worked on geometry of numbers and diophantine approximation, he returned in the later 1950s to the arithmetic of elliptic curves, writing a series of papers connecting the Selmer group with Galois cohomology and laying some of the foundations of the modern theory of infinite descent. His best-known single result may be the proof that the Tate-Shafarevich group, if it is finite, must have order that is a square.
The proof being by construction of an alternating form.
Cassels often studied individual Diophantine equations by algebraic number theory and p-adic methods. His publications include 200 papers. His advanced textbooks have influenced generations of mathematicians.
Some of Cassels"s books have remained in print for decades.
Royal Society.
