Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, who has died aged 101, was one of Britain’s most respected mathematicians, a devoted public servant, a leading educationalist, politician and amateur astronomer — at 79 she climbed a volcano in Hawaii with a camera to observe an eclipse.
At the age of eight, an infection left her almost completely deaf and so she said: “Maths was the one subject in which I was at no disadvantage. Nearly all equations are found in textbooks or shown on the blackboard as the teacher speaks.”
Ollerenshaw lectured around the country. After giving a speech about Manchester’s schools in the 1950s, she became one of the country’s most capable educationalists, setting the agenda for James Callaghan’s “great debate” on the education system in 1976. She wrote two books and dozens of articles on improving girls’ education. At Lancaster University, she led a government inquiry into the issue of women teachers leaving the profession to raise families.
She chaired Manchester’s education committee, and was a Conservative councillor for 25 years and at one stage was the city’s lord mayor, but still found time to write a children’s book, The Lord Mayor’s Party.
She was born in Manchester in 1912, the younger daughter of Charles and Mary Timpson. After boarding at St Leonard’s School, St Andrews, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. While an undergraduate, she became engaged to Robert Ollerenshaw, a surgeon, and they married in 1939.
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After the war, the Ollerenshaws set up home in Manchester, where she lectured in maths at the university. Music was a passion and she chaired the governors of the Royal Northern College of Music. She was also the first female president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and wrote an autobiography, aptly entitled To Speak of Many Things.
Her husband died in 1986. In her seventies she was one of the first people to produce a formula for solving the Rubik’s cube to minimise the number of moves needed, and wrote a book on “magic squares”. She wrote: “The delight of discovery is not a privilege reserved solely for the young.”
— The Times