Links

Home page http://school.maths.uwa.edu.au/~woods/
Erdős–Woods number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Woods_number
http://symomega.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/alan-robert-woods/

A.Woods brief CV

Alan Robert Woods was born on June 21, 1953, in Brisbane, Australia, as the first child of Geoff and Jess Woods. After obtaining a B.Sc. (Honours, 1st class) in Mathematics at the University of Queensland (1971-1974), he continued his studies, completing first an M.Sc. by research at the University of Monash (1975-1978) and then a Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, UK (1978-1981). His Ph.D. thesis was entitled “Some problems in logic and number theory, and their connections” and was supervised by J.B. Paris.

Alan held academic appointments at the University of Malaya (Lecturer, 1982-1985), Yale University (Assistant Professor, 1985-1989) and at the University of Western Australia (Lecturer, 1990-1993, Honorary Research Fellow, 1994-2002, and Adjunct Associate Professor, 2003-2011). He also held visiting positions at Rutgers University (1989), Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2000), Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin (2003) and Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (2003). Alan gave about 30 invited lectures at international conferences, Universities and research centers all over the world.

Alan’s research interests lied in Mathematical Logic, Computational Complexity and their connections with Algebra, Combinatorics and Number Theory. He (co-)authored 17 research papers which appeared in prestigious international journals, including the Journal of Symbolic Logic, Theoretical Computer Science and Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, as well as in conference proceedings volumes. He supervised the Ph.D. thesis of J.M. Foy (Yale University), the M.Sc. thesis of K. Fergusson (University of Western Australia) and was alternate supervisor of the Ph.D. thesis of T.N. French (University of Western Australia).

Alan was always very keen on discussing ideas with colleagues sharing his interests, ready to contribute highly innovative ideas in several research areas. He co-operated with many distinguished researchers all over the world, including C.G. Jockusch, J. Krajicek, A. Maciel, J.B. Paris, P. Pudlak, T. Pitassi, A. Wilkie and others, publishing papers that attracted hundreds of citations.

He was an amateur radio enthusiast. He served as President and committee member of the Western Australia VHF Group and was highly regarded for his technical knowledge. He was also an enthusiastic walker, especially enjoying long Sunday walks on Perth’s beaches.

Alan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2006 and died at his home in Mt. Claremont (Western Australia) in mid-December 2011. He was survived by his son Robert and his daughter Sarah.