John ffitch was definitely born after WWII, in that part of the United
Kingdom which is God's own county, certainly educated at an East
Anglian university in the sixties, and despite his long hair and
lengthening beard, and the uncertain spelling of his name, was never a
hippie. His entire professional career has been as an academic
mathematician/computer scientist, and for most of that time he has
been at The University of Bath, where he held the Chair of
Software Engineering until 2011, a subject about which he knows little.
His main interests have been in Relativity, Planetary Astronomy, Computer
Algebra and LISP, but he has been known to dabble widely, for example
in tank warfare, Latin poetry, Arabic linguistics, compilers, and
company management, all with some lack of success. Strangely enough
he won the Adams Prize for Mathematics a third of a century ago,
but not much since. Hobbies include maintaining Csound, receiving and
losing e-mail, and complaining about the Web. In his spare time he composes.