Doctor Richard Maunder

Second up in the Christ's Maths Fellows 1982-86 collection is Richard Maunder.  This guy was an absolute legend.  He was a pure mathematician, into stuff like algebraic topology and manifolds.  Not my sort of area at all but, in my early days before I dropped all the pure maths, he delivered a great lecture course on group theory and was my pure maths supervisor for a while.  I liked how he showed us enough of the maths for us to be able to fill in the "mathematical rigour" in between the lines.  He had a great dry sense of humour too.  I can't imagine him ever being negative about anything. 

But I can't talk about this guy without mentioning his other big interest too, which was classical music.  He played all sorts of instruments, he would compose music or finish off the work of other composers and (get this!) he would build his own musical instruments.  It's only now that I've found out that the harpsichord that would sit against the wall of his room where he gave supervisions was one that he'd built himself.  And he was such a modest guy that at mathy drinks and dinners we'd only talk about maths.  It's a shame I never got to hear him talk about his music.

As for the portrait, my source photo was in black and white and very close up, so I've done a close up and repeated my technique from the Emilio Largo portrait and used three shades of blue.  Unlike with the Largo drawing, though, I've not drawn in outlines, instead adding a contrasting background colour.  The good thing about leaving out outlines is that I can subtly change the shape of the face by creeping in a bit with the background colour.

The likeness is only vaguely there - leaving out the hair makes things difficult.  But there's something of the character there - a little bit of joy.  Once the four portraits are put together, he should be recognisable.

Doctor Maunder died in 2018.  If you knew him, you'd know he's resting in peace.