In Memoriam William Allan Light (1950-2002)

William Allan Light, known to his friends as ‘‘Will,’’ died on Sunday, December 8, 2002. He was at his home, Gartree House, Illston-on-the-Hill, near Leicester in England, when he was felled by a heart attack. He was 52 years old. Will is survived by his wife, the former Anita Edwards, by his mother, Mrs. Mary Light of Lancaster, and by a sister, Helen Johnson. At the time of death, Will was an active member of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Leicester University and was a Pro-Vice Chancellor of that University. Will was born on April 19, 1950, in Chester, England. He attended The University of Sussex and received there, in 1971, the degree of Bachelor of Science with honors. In the next year, he received a Certificate of Education from the University of North Wales and then went to Lancaster University, where he earned a Master of Arts degree (awarded with distinction) in the Department of Mathematics. Remaining at Lancaster, he then embarked on doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Charles Clenshaw. This work culminated in the awarding of the Doctorate of Philosophy in Mathematics in 1976. His dissertation concerned projections in numerical analysis, a theme that he continued to pursue after the doctorate. Will served first as Lecturer and then as Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Lancaster. He was noted for the clarity of his lectures and for an ability to keep the attention of his audience. In 1988, Will and his colleague John Gilbert took over the organization of the Science and Engineering Research Council’s Summer Schools in Numerical Analysis at Lancaster. These had been initiated in 1981 by Will’s then colleague, Peter Turner. Many young mathematicians owe their successful careers to the stimulation of these summer schools, in which attendees were brought into contact with pre-eminent experts through a program of lectures on special topics. In 1991, Will was appointed to a new Chair of Applied Mathematics and to Head of Department at the University of Leicester. Here, he arrived with a mandate to elevate the department’s strength in applied mathematics and computing. With the addition of brilliant young experts to the faculty, he succeeded astonishingly well in this endeavor, which was still in progress at the time of his death. In 1998, Will ARTICLE IN PRESS

[1]  W. Light,et al.  On Power Functions and Error Estimates for Radial Basis Function Interpolation , 1998 .

[2]  Ward Cheney,et al.  A course in approximation theory , 1999 .

[3]  W. Light.  Some Aspects of Radial Basis Function Approximation , 1992 .

[4]  E. Cheney,et al.  Quasi-interpolation with translates of a function having noncompact support , 1992 .

[5]  W. Cheney,et al.  Convolution operators for radial basis approximation , 1996 .

[6]  S. M. Holland,et al.  The L1-version of the Diliberto–Straus algorithm in C( T × S) , 1984 .

[7]  R. Beatson,et al.  Quasi-interpolation in the Absence of Polynomial Reproduction , 1992 .

[8]  Nira Dyn,et al.  Interpolation by piecewise-linear radial basis functions, II , 1989 .

[9]  Will Light,et al.  Approximation with monotone norms in tensor product spaces , 1992 .

[10]  Will Light,et al.  Norms of some projections on C[a, b] , 1977 .

[11]  W. A. Light.  Techniques for generating approximations via convolution kernels , 2005, Numerical Algorithms.

[12]  Elliott Ward Cheney,et al.  The approximation of bivariate functions by sums of univariate ones using the L1-metric , 1982 .

[13]  W. Light,et al.  On local and controlled approximation order , 1993 .

[14]  W. A. Light,et al.  A note on Goldbach's conjecture , 1980 .

[15]  Xingping Sun,et al.  Approximation by Translates of a Positive Definite Function , 1996 .

[16]  William A. Light.  Projections on spaces of continuous functions. , 1979 .

[17]  A. K. Pujari,et al.  Data Mining Techniques , 2006 .

[18]  Will Light,et al.  Interpolation by Translates of a Basis Function , 1997 .

[19]  M. Golitschek,et al.  Interpolation by Polynomials and Radial Basis Functions on Spheres , 2000 .

[20]  M. Golitschek,et al.  Approximation by solutions of the planar wave equation , 1992 .

[21]  Will Light.  A note on proximinality in function spaces F(S,X) , 1990 .

[22]  W. A. Light,et al.  Projections on tensor product spaces , 1985 .

[23]  R. Beatson,et al.  Fast evaluation of radial basis functions : methods for two-dimensional polyharmonic splines , 1997 .

[24]  W. A. Light,et al.  Envelope Solutions for Implicit Ordinary Differential Equations , 1990 .

[25]  Will Light,et al.  Some optimality conditions for Chebyshev expansions , 1979 .

[26]  Will Light,et al.  Extension Theorems for Spaces Arising from Approximation by Translates of a Basic Function , 2002, J. Approx. Theory.

[27]  Will Light,et al.  ERROR ESTIMATES FOR APPROXIMATION BY RADIAL BASIS FUNCTIONS , 1995 .

[28]  Yuan Xu,et al.  Constructive methods of approximation by ridge functions and radial functions , 2005, Numerical Algorithms.

[29]  Richard K. Beatson,et al.  Fast Solution of the Radial Basis Function Interpolation Equations: Domain Decomposition Methods , 2000, SIAM J. Sci. Comput..

[30]  R. A. Brownlee,et al.  Approximation orders for interpolation by surface splines to rough functions , 2004, 0705.4281.

[31]  Carlo Franchetti,et al.  Minimal projections in tensor-product spaces , 1984 .

[32]  Will Light,et al.  The Alternating Algorithm in Uniformly Convex Spaces , 1984 .

[33]  Will Light,et al.  On the approximation of a bivariate function by the sum of univariate functions , 1980 .

[34]  R. Beatson,et al.  Quasi-interpolation by thin-plate splines on a square , 1993 .

[35]  W. Light,et al.  A Comparison Between Chebyshev and Ultraspherical Expansions , 1978 .

[36]  W. Light.  Ridge Functions, Sigmoidal Functions and Neural Networks , 1993 .

[37]  Will Light.  The singularity of distance matrices , 1989 .

[38]  Will Light,et al.  On the von Neumann alternating algorithm in Hilbert space , 1986 .

[39]  Will Light,et al.  Interpolation by periodic radial basis functions , 1992 .

[40]  Will Light,et al.  Advances in Numerical Analysis, Vol. II: Wavelets, Subdivision Algorithms, and Radial Basis Functions. , 1993 .

[41]  Will Light,et al.  Minimal projections in bivariate function spaces , 1985 .

[42]  Will Light.  Convergence of the diliberto-straus algorithm in L1 (XxY) , 1981 .

[43]  D. A. Silaev,et al.  Approximation of smooth functions by S-splines , 1986 .

[44]  Will Light,et al.  The L1-version of the Diliberto–Straus algorithm in C(T × S) , 1984, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.

[45]  W. A. Light,et al.  Minimal projections in Lp-spaces , 1985 .