Ralph Jeffery was born on October 3, 1889 in Overton, Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. He left school in the middle of Grade 8 to join his father as a fisherman. However, at age 21 he sent out to up-grade his academic qualifications and was soon Principal of Port Maitland High School. He married Nellie Churchill of Overton who encouraged him to enroll in Acadia University. Graduating in 1921 with a major in economics and having taken one course in Calculus and one in Analytic Geometry, he embarked on graduate work in mathematics at Cornell followed by a year at Harvard. Except for a leave in 1928 when he completed a Ph.D. at Cornell and one term in 1938 acting as Head of Mathematics at the University of Saskatchewan, he served as Head of Mathematics at Acadia from 1924 to 1942. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1937.

Jeffery accepted the position of Head of Mathematics at Queen's University in 1942 partly in order to get closer to mathematics research activity. He encouraged good undergraduate teaching, built up a flourishing research and graduate program and served for many years as Chair of the Board of Graduate Studies. His contributions to Queen's University were commemorated in the naming of Jeffery Hall. Upon his retirement in 1960, Jeffery returned to an active teaching role at Acadia until his death in 1975. In his 85th year, he taught three full courses! His first wife died in 1956 and, in 1970, he married Frances Lewis of Bedford.

On one occasion, he drove by car from Kingston to a meeting in Toronto returned by train and was surprised to notice that his car was not in the parking lot! As a lecturer, he was rather slow and deliberate. One of his students commented of him pausing, running his chalk-covered hands around his mouth and ruminating on the next step in his argument.

His brief clear Calculus (1954) ran into three editions and his readable Theory of Functions of a Real Variable (1951) had a second edition in 1954 and was reprinted in 1962. His address as President of the Royal Society of Canada in 1953 appeared in 1956 as Trigonometrical Series.

There is little doubt that he regarded as his proudest achievement, the establishment of the Summer Research Institute (SRI) of the Canadian Mathematical Congress which he directed each year from 1950 to 1965. By creating the SRI and by consistently encouraging research he made an outstanding contribution to mathematics in Canada. This was recognized by honorary degrees from Acadia, Dalhousie, St. Mary's, Memorial, McMaster, Windsor and Queen's universities.

Lloyd Williams

Lloyd Williams was born into a Quaker family in Friendship, Kansas, on October 3rd, 1888. He was named after the famous campaigner for the abolition of slavery, William Lloyd Garrison. He was known as Lloyd Williams or sometimes W.L.G. Williams. Lloyd's father had a number of children by his first wife but Lloyd was his mother's only child; she died when he was only five.

Lloyd was a bright little boy with a scholarly disposition; he was especially intrigued by anything connected with numbers. In addition to his love of mathematics, he continued to have a great interest in other disciplines; as an undergraduate he was a Classics major and he continued his interest in Classics throughout his life. He was a "born teacher" (if there is such a thing) and took great delight in seeing young people learn and develop. When his daughters were very little - before they had even learned to talk - he started talking to them in Latin as he believed that foreign languages should be taught to children at an early age.

He had a natural talent for communicating with people. Maybe because he was interested in them and in what they were doing, he seemed to relate quite easily to them. His Quaker background had also taught him to be sensitive to the needs of others.

These talents were enhanced by his early experience and work; they were the ideal prelude to his years with the Canadian Mathematical Congress. He certainly never thought of them as training but indeed the skills he had acquired over the years were just what were needed for his work with the Congress.

After his mother's death it was fortunate for Lloyd that the Tomlinsons, parents of his father's first wife, took him in and brought him up on their farm in Indiana. At the completion of grade school, the school superintendent gave him a failing grade in arithmetic; he felt that he should be held back a year because he was small for his age. This did not sit too well with Grandpa Tomlinson so he enrolled him in the local Quaker Academy. This turned out to be a fortuitous event because one of his teachers took an interest in him and it was through his efforts that Lloyd had the opportunity of attending Haverford College. When after his graduation he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship (to Oxford) he decided to study Mathematics - even though he had a weak background in the subject; at Haverford he had majored in Classics.

The Oxford tutorial system had a great influence on him. In a paper written in the early 1940s he states: "It is my considered opinion that the system practiced in the universities of North America of trying to educate young men and young women by herding them together in rooms and lecturing to them is a failure. If you will throw the good and the ambitious student on his own, help him but not spoonfeed him, he can accomplish twice as much and do it twice as well as he can under the conditions that largely obtain in our universities."

Lloyd's graduate work was done in the summers at the University of Chicago. For his doctoral dissertation, he was given a topic by L. E. Dickson. The next contact with Prof. Dickson was when many months later he sent a progress report on his work. He received back a letter accepting the work as his Ph.D. thesis! The title of his thesis was: "Fundamental Systems of Formal Modular Seminvariants of the Binary Cubic"; it was published in the Transactions in 1921. He continued his work on modular forms for some years and, at the International Congress in Toronto in 1924, he presented a paper on his work.

While at the University of Chicago one summer, he met Anne Christine Sykes, his future wife. She was an accomplished pianist with wide interests. Although she herself was not a mathematician her father had graduated (summa cum laude) from Harvard with a major in Mathematics and taught Mathematics (and Greek) at the private boys school he and a classmate founded in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In a convocation address at the University of Alberta, Prof. Coxeter says "Mathematics bridges the gulf between the humanities and the sciences. In fact, I sometimes feel more like an artist than a scientist". Anne was very fond of art - her mother was a painter; she appreciated and respected mathematicians and "bought" the fact that mathematics contains great beauty. It is a fortunate thing that she did because she spent much time in the company of mathematicians. She was very popular with them as well. Philip Hall, who was a lecturer at the 1957 Congress - at the Summer Seminar he gave some beautiful lectures on Nilpotent Groups (which have never been published but are still referred to) - contributed to the eightieth birthday scrapbook. To quote from his note: "The pleasantest memories of my visit to Canada in 1957 come back to me, especially the car drives in the Banff neighbourhood... Most of all, I remember with gratitude the kindness of a gracious lady from Cincinnati"

In the fall of 1924, Lloyd Williams joined the Mathematics Department of McGill University: he remained at McGill until his retirement in 1954. Originally he shared an office in the Engineering Building with Charlie Sullivan but later he had Gordon Pall as an office mate. Charlie Sullivan and Lloyd Williams used to get together every year and work through some book or series of papers. This was as near as McGill would come to having a faculty seminar.

In an autobiographical sketch, Raoul Bott recalls: "My first teacher in the Calculus was Prof. Williams. He was beautiful! Some professors taught in gowns, English style, and he was one of these. His gown was unbelievably old, chalk crusted and slightly torn. With his hair flying and his gown flapping, Prof. Williams' lectures were not a model of clarity, but I found shining through them his love of the subject and also his general benevolent view of life and mankind."

In 1936, he was appointed Chairman of the McGill University Library Committee.

A class Lloyd Williams took pleasure in teaching was one he always referred to as the "Advanced Section". This was a class of first year students with high matriculation exam scores. He would order books from England and distribute them himself to save the students money. Often the class would start out with a large enrolment but after judicious "weeding out", would end up with about twenty. At that point, the students were all guaranteed an A in the course, a device which seemed to work well. There were no complaints about students "slacking off". The students were in awe of the professor. Raoul Bott notes: "Kind though he was, he also had high standards, and he failed 75 percent of the calculus class one year!"

Although he was respected by those who worked with him, they also saw his human weaknesses - and even found them quite endearing. Several of those who wrote after his death remark on his "unique personality" or "unforgettable personality". Donald Coxeter's letter refers to his "absentmindedness".

G. de B. Robinson first met Lloyd at the Royal Society meeting in Montreal in 1936. They met again to discuss the possibility of founding a mathematical society in Canada. It was a difficult time and several mathematicians were involved in the war efforts. What Lloyd was trying to do was to provide some sort of forum which would bring Canadian mathematicians together. A large part of the success of the Canadian Mathematica Congress (now Society) was due to the vision and enthusiasm of Lloyd Williams, who was the Treasurer from 1945 to 1965.

When Lloyd Williams started planning the organization for Canadian mathematicians, he was extremely anxious that all parts of the mathematical community be included. He had attended the Toronto Congress in 1924 when the Central Powers had been excluded. After moving to Montreal, Lloyd Williams had been attracted to the French section of the city. He worked hard on his French and made friends with many in the French community.

He also had ties to the Jewish community and was a sponsor of the Temple Emanu-El Institute. Having come from the States, where there was much prejudice against blacks, he was surprised to find that no such prejudice existed in Canada. Lloyd was the first to supervise a Ph.D. thesis in Mathematics for a black student.

The years 1943-1945 were busy ones in the Williams household. The idea of forming some kind of association of mathematicians was just taking root in his mind but probably in the mind of others as well.

It was also a time when Lloyd Williams realized how many children would need help after the hostilities were over; and he began to work on plans for forming a Canadian Save the Children Fund (CSCF). After his retirement from McGill in 1954, he joined the Board of the Canadian Friends Service Committee, acting as it's Chairman from 1959-1963.

From the very first, the name given to the organization was the Canadian Mathematical Congress. It was believed that its choice of names was connected in some way with the desire to include French and English speaking mathematicians on an equal footing.

Professor Magee describes in some detail the fund raising methods Lloyd Williams employed: "At the University of Western Ontario, members of the Department of Mathematics were greatly impressed by the zeal and enthusiasm displayed by Prof. Williams in his role as an administrator in the affairs of the Canadian Mathematical Congress. He established firm and lasting friendships with leading industrialists. It was an education to see how easily a genuine rapport with industry was made and to marvel at the effective measures employed to gain financial support for the Congress."

Learning of Lloyd Williams' successes in raising money for the Congress, he was appointed Vice-Chairman of the Finance Committee for the 1950 International Congress in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He commented quite often that US companies were much "tougher nuts to crack" than their Canadian counterparts. Although he never gave up his US citizenship, he had a warm feeling for his adopted country. He found it most exhilarating to lay the foundation for a mathematics community that was just waiting to be gathered. Although he taught at McGill University for twenty years before the Congress was started, it was through his part in it that he grew to love Canada so much.

For his many contributions to the CMC Lloyd Williams was awarded an honorary LL.D. by four universities - the University of Montreal, the University of Manitoba, Dalhousie University and Mount Allison University.

Lloyd Williams died in 1976. He was a great man who left a great legacy. His example will long be an inspiration.