Frederick Valentine Atkinson was a British mathematician, formerly of the University of Toronto, Canada, where he spent most of his career.
Education
His Doctor of Philosophy advisor at Oxford was Edward Charles Titchmarsh. The following synopsis is condensed (with permission) from Mingarelli"s tribute to F. V. Atkinson: He attended Saint Paul’s School in West Kensington from 1929-1934 (in the same place that educated the poet John Milton, Samuel Pepys, mathematicians J. East. Littlewood, Federal Reserve System, and G.N. Watson Federal Reserve System. Atkinson attended The Queen"s College, Oxford in 1934 with a scholarship.
Career
Atkinson"s theorem and Atkinson–Wilcox theorem are named after him. The High Master of Saint Paul’s once wrote of Atkinson: “Extremely promising: He should make a brilliant mathematician”! Auto-didactic when it came to languages, he taught himself and became fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, Urdu, German, Hungarian, and Russian with some proficiency in Spanish, Italian, and French. His dissertation at Oxford in 1939 established, among other such results, asymptotic formulae for the average value of the square of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line.
His final Examining Board at Oxford University consisted of G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood and East.C. Titchmarsh.
His first academic appointment was at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1939-1940, followed by a commission (1940) in the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. He then took a position as Lecturer in Christ Church, Oxford.
From 1948-1955 he was Full Professor in Mathematics (Chair, and Dean of Arts) at University College, Ibadan, in Nigeria. He joined Canberra University College (now part of Australian National University) in 1955 as Head of its Department of Mathematics.
He left for the University of Toronto, in Toronto, Canada, in 1960 where he was Professor until his retirement in 1982 and Professor Emeritus until his death in 2002.
Membership
During his stay at Queen"s, he was secretary of the Chinese Student Society, and a member of the Indian Student Society.