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Robert May, Baron May of Oxford

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Robert McCredie May, Baron May of Oxford (8 January 1936 – 28 April 2020) was an Australian scientist who was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, President of the Royal Society,[8] and a professor at the University of Sydney and Princeton University. He held joint professorships at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He was also a crossbench member of the House of Lords from 2001 until his retirement in 2017.

The Right Honourable
The Lord May of Oxford
OM AC FRS HonFREng FAA FTSE FRSN
May in 2009
59th President of the Royal Society
In office
2000–2005
Preceded byAaron Klug
Succeeded byMartin Rees
Personal details
Born
Robert McCredie May

(1936-01-08)8 January 1936[1]
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Died28 April 2020(2020-04-28) (aged 84)
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
CitizenshipAustralia
Alma materUniversity of Sydney
Known forLogistic map,[6] stability-complexity studies[7]
Spouse(s)
Judith Feiner, Lady May
​
​
(m. 1962)​
[1]
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical ecology
InstitutionsImperial College London
University of Oxford
Harvard University
ThesisInvestigations towards an understanding of superconductivity (1959)
Doctoral students
Other notable studentsMartin Nowak (postdoc)[5]
Websitewww.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/view/may_r.htm

May was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and an appointed member of the council of the British Science Association. He was also a member of the advisory council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering.[9]

Early life and education

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May was born in Sydney on 8 January 1936, to lawyer[10] Henry Wilkinson May and Kathleen Mitchell (née McCredie),[11][12] who divorced when he was seven years old.[1][13] His father was of prosperous middle-class Northern Irish origin, and his mother was the daughter of a Scottish engineer.[14] May was educated at Sydney Boys High School.[1] He then attended the University of Sydney, where he studied chemical engineering and theoretical physics (BSc 1956) and received a PhD in theoretical physics in 1959.[15] He was a patron of the Sydney High School Old Boys Union.[16]

Career and research

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Career

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The logistic map, pictured here, was a seminal discovery by May that demonstrated how even a simple equation could result in chaos.

Early in his career, May developed an interest in animal population dynamics and the relationship between complexity and stability in natural communities.[17][18] He was able to make major advances in the field of population biology through the application of mathematical techniques. His work played a key role in the development of theoretical ecology through the 1970s and 1980s. He also applied these tools to the study of disease and to the study of biodiversity.

May was Gordon MacKay Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University (1959–61) and returned to the University of Sydney (1962) as senior lecturer, reader, and professor (1969–72) in theoretical physics. From 1973 until 1988, he was Class of 1977 Professor of Zoology at Princeton University, serving as chairman of the University Research Board 1977–88. From 1988 until 1995, he held a Royal Society Research Professorship jointly at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, where he became a fellow of Merton College and a Master of Arts.[when?] He was Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government and head of the Office of Science and Technology (1995–2000), and president of the Royal Society (2000–2005).[19]

Public life

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May held subsidiary appointments as executive trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, member of the board of the United Kingdom Sports Institute, foundation trustee of the Gates Trust (University of Cambridge), chairman of the board of trustees of the Natural History Museum, trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, independent member of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, trustee of World Wildlife Fund-UK, president of the British Ecological Society, and member of the Committee on Climate Change.

In 1996, May asked Ig Nobel to stop awarding prizes to British scientists because this might lead the public to treat worthwhile research less seriously (see Criticism of Ig Nobel).

Climate change co-operation

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Although an atheist since age 11, May stated that religion may help society deal with climate change. While referring to what he believed to be a rigid structure of fundamentalist religion, he stated that the co-operational aspects of non-fundamentalist religion may in fact help with climate change. When asked if religious leaders should be doing more to persuade people to combat climate change, he stated that it was absolutely necessary.[20] May also estimated that there may be approximately 7 million species present in the Earth, both animal and plant combined.

Awards and honours

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May was appointed Knight Bachelor in 1996,[21] and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1998. In 2001, on the recommendation of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, he was created a life peer. He was one of the first fifteen peers to be elevated in this manner. After his initial preference for "Baron May of Woollahra" failed an objection from the Protocol Office of the Australian Prime Minister's Department, he chose the style and title Baron May of Oxford, of Oxford in the County of Oxfordshire.[22][23] He was made a member of the Order of Merit in 2002.[24]

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977[25] and to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1979. He became a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1991, a Foreign Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1992,[26] a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001,[27] a member of the Academia Europaea in 1994, and Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 2010.[28]

In 2005 he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.[2] In 2009 Lord May became only the 7th ever Honorary Fellow of the Australian Institute of Building (HonFAIB).[29] He received honorary degrees from universities including Uppsala[30](1990), Yale (1993), Sydney (1995), Princeton (1996), and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (2003). He was awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize by the University of Oxford (1980), an Award by the MacArthur Foundation (1984), the Medal of the Linnean Society of London (1991), the Marsh Christian Prize (1992), the Frink Medal by the Zoological Society of London (1995), the Crafoord Prize (1996), the Balzan Prize (1998) for Biodiversity and the Copley Medal by the Royal Society (2007) and the Lord Lewis Prize by the Royal Society of Chemistry (2008).[31]

Personal life

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During his postdoctoral research at the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard University as Gordon MacKay Lecturer in Applied Mathematics, between 1959 and 1961, May met his wife, Judith Feiner,[1] a native of Manhattan.[32][33] The Mays had a daughter, Naomi.[32]

May died at a nursing home in Oxford of pneumonia complicated by Alzheimer's disease on 28 April 2020, aged 84.[34][35]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e "MAY OF OXFORD". Who's Who. Vol. 2017 (online Oxford University Press ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ a b "List of Fellows". raeng.org.uk. Royal Academy of Engineering.
  3. ^ Sugihara, George; May, Robert (1990). "Nonlinear forecasting as a way of distinguishing chaos from measurement error in time series". Nature. 344 (6268): 734–741. Bibcode:1990Natur.344..734S. doi:10.1038/344734a0. PMID 2330029. S2CID 4370167.
  4. ^ Sugihara, George; May, Robert; Ye, Hao; Hsieh, Chih-hao; Deyle, Ethan; Fogarty, Michael; Munch, Stephan (2012). "Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems". Science. 338 (6106): 496–500. Bibcode:2012Sci...338..496S. doi:10.1126/science.1227079. PMID 22997134. S2CID 19749064.
  5. ^ Tilman, D.; May, R. M.; Lehman, C. L.; Nowak, M. A. (1994). "Habitat destruction and the extinction debt". Nature. 371 (6492): 65. Bibcode:1994Natur.371...65T. doi:10.1038/371065a0. S2CID 4308409.
  6. ^ Gravel, Dominique; Massol, François; Leibold, Mathew A. (2016). "Stability and complexity in model meta-ecosystems". Nature Communications. 7: 12457. Bibcode:2016NatCo...712457G. doi:10.1038/ncomms12457. PMC 4999499. PMID 27555100.
  7. ^ May, Robert M. (18 August 1972). "Will a Large Complex System be Stable?". Nature. 238 (5364): 413–414. Bibcode:1972Natur.238..413M. doi:10.1038/238413a0. PMID 4559589. S2CID 4262204.
  8. ^ Bradbury, Jane (2000). "Sir Robert May: A new face at the Royal Society". The Lancet. 356 (9227): 406–736. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)73556-X. PMID 10972381. S2CID 34829440.
  9. ^ "Advisory Council of the Campaign for Science and Engineering". Retrieved 11 February 2011.
  10. ^ "Robert May (1936 - 2020)". mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk.
  11. ^ Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage, 148th edition, ed. Charles Kidd, Debrett's Peerage Ltd, 2011, p. 1058
  12. ^ Dod's Parliamentary Companion, Dod's Parliamentary Companion Ltd, ed. Helen Haxell, 2009, p. 766
  13. ^ Ferry, Georgina (29 April 2020). "Lord May of Oxford obituary". The Guardian – via www.theguardian.com.
  14. ^ "Lord Robert May, physicist and ecologist | Australian Academy of Science". www.science.org.au.
  15. ^ May, Robert McCredie (1959). Investigations towards an understanding of superconductivity. trove.nla.gov.au (PhD thesis). University of Sydney. OCLC 221204076.
  16. ^ "Patrons". 9 February 2008.
  17. ^ May, Robert M. (1976). "Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics". Nature. 261 (5560): 459–467. Bibcode:1976Natur.261..459M. doi:10.1038/261459a0. hdl:10338.dmlcz/104555. PMID 934280. S2CID 2243371.
  18. ^ Robert May, Baron May of Oxford publications indexed by Google Scholar  
  19. ^ Krebs, Lord (John); Hassell, Michael; Godfray, Sir Charles (2021). "Lord Robert May of Oxford OM. 8 January 1936—28 April 2020". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 71: 375–398. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2021.0007. S2CID 235598938.
  20. ^ Richard Alleyne, "Maybe religion is the answer" claims-atheist-scientist, The Daily Telegraph, 7 September 2009]
  21. ^ "No. 54255". The London Gazette (Supplement). 30 December 1995. p. 2.
  22. ^ "No. 56282". The London Gazette. 23 July 2001. p. 8681.
  23. ^ Annabel Crabb, Good Lord, he said what?,The Sunday Age, 20 November 2005
  24. ^ "No. 56746". The London Gazette. 8 November 2002. p. 13557.
  25. ^ "Robert McCredie May". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 19 October 2021.
  26. ^ "Robert May". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 19 October 2021.
  27. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 19 October 2021.
  28. ^ "Fellows of RSNSW". RSNSW. Retrieved 25 June 2012.
  29. ^ The first six honorary fellows of the Australian Institute of Building (HonFAIB) are: HRH Prince Philip, Sir Eric Neil AC CVO, Janet Holmes a'Court AC, James Service AO, Sir Laurence Street AC KCMG QC, and Sir John Holland AC [vale]. Subsequent appointments are Professor Marie Bashir AC CVO and Dr Kenneth Michael AC. "Life and Honorary Fellows". Australian Institute of Building. Retrieved 21 April 2014.
  30. ^ Naylor, David (9 June 2023). "Honorary doctorates - Uppsala University, Sweden". www.uu.se.
  31. ^ "Lord May delivers inaugural Lord Lewis Prize lecture". Royal Society of Chemistry. 4 March 2009. Retrieved 24 February 2024.
  32. ^ a b "Lord Robert May". Australian Academy of Science.
  33. ^ May, Robert McCredie (2001) Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-08861-7
  34. ^ "Robert May, former UK chief scientist and chaos theory pioneer, dies aged 84". The Guardian. 29 April 2020. Retrieved 29 April 2020.
  35. ^ "Robert May, an Uncontainable 'Big Picture' Scientist, Dies at 84". The New York Times. 12 May 2020. Retrieved 12 May 2020.
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Government offices
Preceded by Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government
1995–2000 		Succeeded by
Professional and academic associations
Preceded by 59th President of the Royal Society
2000–2005 		Succeeded by
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