John Kingman

Who is John Kingman?

Sir John Frank Charles Kingman, FRS is a British mathematician.

He was N. M. Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge from 2001 until 2006, when he was succeeded by Sir David Wallace. He is famous for developing the mathematics of the coalescent, a theoretical model of inheritance, which is fundamental to modern population genetics.

The grandson of a coal miner and son of a government scientist with a PhD in chemistry, Kingman was born in Beckenham, Kent and grew up in the outskirts of London, where he attended Christ's College, Finchley, which was then a state grammar school. He was awarded a scholarship to read mathematics at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1956. On graduating in 1960, he began work on his PhD under the supervision of Peter Whittle, studying queueing theory, Markov chains and regenerative phenomena. A year later, Whittle left Cambridge for the University of Manchester, and, rather than follow him there, Kingman moved instead to Oxford where he resumed his work under David Kendall.