Posted by tpc at June 6th, 2009

I’ve never met him, but he did research in the area of partitions and was a friend of several people I know. One of them - Shaun Cooper - by pure chance found a reference to Richard in the 1996 autobiography of Howard Marks named “Mr Nice”. On the cover it said of Marks “He was Britain’s most wanted man. He has just spent seven years in America’s toughest penitentiary. You’ll like him.”

On page 73, here’s a paragraph of what he had to say.

There were one or two ex-Oxford students attached to the University of Sussex. One was a brilliant mathematics lecturer, Richard Lewis, who would often visit Ilze and me along with Johnny and Gina Martin. Richard came from a relatively wealthy family, owned property in Brighton and London, drank like a fish, smoked everything at hand, thought mathematical profundities, and was a keen and talented chess player. He had heard of Go, was interested in the game, but had never played. I taught him. After a dozen games, he beat me. He still beats me.

There are a few more references to Richard and his wife in the following pages, get the book and read it!