Klaus Friedrich Roth, 1925–2015 the Godfrey Argent Studio C
e Bull. London Math. Soc. 50 (2018) 529–560 C 2017 Authors doi:10.1112/blms.12143 OBITUARY Klaus Friedrich Roth, 1925–2015 The Godfrey Argent Studio C Klaus Friedrich Roth, who died in Inverness on 10 November 2015 aged 90, made fundamental contributions to different areas of number theory, including diophantine approximation, the large sieve, irregularities of distribution and what is nowadays known as arithmetic combinatorics. He was the first British winner of the Fields Medal, awarded in 1958 for his solution in 1955 of the famous Siegel conjecture concerning approximation of algebraic numbers by rationals. He was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 17 May 1951, and received its De Morgan Medal in 1983. 1. Life and career Klaus Roth, son of Franz and Matilde (n´ee Liebrecht), was born on 29 October 1925, in the German city of Breslau, in Lower Silesia, Prussia, now Wroclaw in Poland. To escape from Nazism, he and his parents moved to England in 1933 and settled in London. He would recall that the flight from Berlin to London took eight hours and landed in Croydon. Franz, a solicitor by training, had suffered from gas poisoning during the First World War, and died a few years after their arrival in England. Roth studied at St Paul’s School between 1937 and 1943, during which time the school was relocated to Easthampstead Park, near Crowthorne in Berkshire, as part of the wartime evac- uation of London. There he excelled in mathematics and chess, and one master, Mr Dowswell, observed interestingly that he possessed complete intellectual honesty.
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