The Founding Director of the Heilbronn Institute of Mathematical Research (2005 – 2009)

It is with great sadness that we note the death of Professor Elmer Rees. Professor Rees was the Founding Director of the Heilbronn Institute of Mathematical Research (2005 – 2009), after which he held an Honorary Visiting Professorship at the University of Bristol.

Elmer moved to Bristol in 2005 to establish the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research and was the Institute Director from 2005 to 2009. The Heilbronn Institute is now a national mathematical research institute with major consequential benefits to UK Mathematics and national security. Elmer’s contributions to its development have been of central importance to its subsequent success.

Read an obituary of Elmer Rees by Jon Keating, Chair of the Heilbronn Institute (2015-2020), which was published in November 2019.

Memorial Conference: To honour Elmer’s life and his contributions to UK mathematics, the Institute will be holding a one-day Elmer Rees memorial conference on 10 February 2020. More information on the conference webpage.

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A full obituary of Elmer Rees by John Jones (Warwick) has been published in September 2025 in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society . ISSN 0024-6093 | Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1112/blms.70082 | Download the article in .pdf in this link.

Abstract: Elmer Gethin Rees was born in Carmarthenshire, West Wales, on 9 November 1941 and died on 4 October 2019.

Elmer was an undergraduate in Cambridge and a PhD student at Warwick. After Warwick, he held short‐term positions in Hull, IAS Princeton and Swansea. Then, in 1971, he was appointed to a fellowship in St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He left Oxford in 1979 for a professorship in Edinburgh, where he stayed until 2005.

His research interests were in geometry and topology, and his publications cover the full range of this broad field. There are two particularly notable collaborations in his work: the first with Emery Thomas from Berkeley, and the second with Victor Buchstaber from Moscow.

He was very active in all aspects of mathematical life, research, teaching, and service. One of Elmer’s lasting contributions to the mathematical community was his role in establishing the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh in 1990. He was the Founding Director of the Heilbronn Institute of Mathematical Research from 2005 until 2009. In 2009 Elmer was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Elmer was a Welsh‐speaking Welshman and this was very important to him. He had an infectious sense of humour and a seemingly endless collection of anecdotes. Combined with an underlying seriousness of purpose, this made him a wonderful person to work with.