George Leo Watson
George Leo Watson was a British mathematician, who specialized in number theory.Education and career
Watson matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1927, where he was tutored in mathematics by S. Pollard and A. S. Besicovitch. After graduating in 1930 he went to India as a District Commissioner in Nagpur. There he spent his leisure time studying the number theory books of Leonard Dickson and began to work on research in number theory. After India's independence he returned to England and taught at South London's Acton Technical College. In 1951 he attracted the attention of professional mathematicians with a new proof of the seven cubes theorem; Watson's proof was considerably simpler than the 1943 proof by Yuri Linnik. Harold Davenport helped Watson get a job as a Lecturer at University College London and served as the doctoral advisor for Watson's 1953 thesis Some topics in number theory. At University College London, Watson became in 1961 in a Reader and in 1970 a Professor, then retired in 1977 as Professor Emeritus.
In 1968 Watson was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society for three of his papers on number theory: Diophantine equations reducible to quadratics, Non-homogeneous cubic equations, and Asymmetric inequalities for indefinite quadratic forms.Selected publications
