Barry Edward Johnson
Born: 1 Aug 1937 in Woolwich, London,
England
Barry Johnson's father was an engineer. Barry was the oldest of the three children having one younger brother and a younger adopted sister. He was educated at Epsom County Grammar School in Surrey, England, and then at Hobart State High School in Tasmania when the family moved there in 1951. After his family returned to England, Johnson remained at Hobart High School since the headmaster had told them of his [1]:-
... exceptional high all-round intelligence
persuading him to remain there to study for a place at university.
Although only 16 years of age, he won an entrance scholarship to the University of Tasmania in March 1954. He entered the University of Tasmania, looked after by a [1]:-
... kind family, but with little spare cash for clothing or luxuries.
He studied mathematics as his main subject but he was also extremely successful in his subsidiary subjects of physics and chemistry winning a prize from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. He was awarded a B.Sc. with First Class Honours in 1956. Peter Sprent, who taught him during his undergraduate years, writes [1]:-
Few students have ever inspired their lecturers as did Barry Johnson at the University of Tasmania in the 1950s. It was then the practice in the mathematics department to encourage honours students to give seminars for fellow students and lecturers. Johnson's contribution to these, as well as his penetrating and challenging (but never aggressive) questioning of views expressed in lectures left no doubt among his teachers that we were contributing in a modest way to the training of a mathematical giant. A small incident that epitomises this remains fresh in my memory. Berated by colleagues for having set too hard an examination paper, my defences crumbled when a senior colleague's response to my request to justify the charge was: "Of course, it was. Barry Johnson only got 98 per cent." I pleaded guilty.
In order to undertake research in pure mathematics Johnson returned to England where he undertook research in functional analysis at Gonville and Caius College of the University of Cambridge, being awarded a Ph.D. in 1961.
After completing his doctorate, Johnson was appointed as an instructor in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent the year 1961-62 at Berkeley and then remained in the United States in the following year, spending 1962-63 as a visiting lecturer at Yale University. While there Johnson married Jennifer Munday, whom he had met in Cambridge. The newly married couple returned to England in 1963 when Johnson was appointed as a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Exeter. After two years at Exeter, he was appointed as a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Promoted to Reader at Newcastle in 1968, he became Professor of Pure Mathematics the following year.
Barry Johnson spent the year 1970-71 as a visiting professor at Yale University. In 1976 he became Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics at Newcastle and then two years later he was honoured by being elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London. He served as Head of the School of Mathematics at Newcastle from 1983 to 1986 and then he became Dean of the Faculty of Science, holding this office from 1986 until 1989. He visited the United States again for the academic year 1990-91, spending this period as a visiting professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
He served the London Mathematical Society as a member of the Council during 1975-78, then as 60th president of the Society in 1980-82. In 1993 he was appointed as auditor for the Higher Education Quality Control Council in the Division of Quality Audit. This Council rates the teaching quality of the universities in England. Johnson has been a governor of the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle since 1987.
Johnson is well known for his work on Banach algebras. His mathematical publications started in 1964 with a series of papers on topological algebras, measure algebras and Banach algebras. In these he examined the theory of centralizers and the continuity of transformations. In 1964 he wrote a joint paper with Ringrose Derivations of operator algebras and discrete group algebras and his papers continued to examine the continuity of homomorphisms, derivations and linear operators.
In 1972 Johnson wrote a joint paper with Ringrose and Kadison on cohomology of operator algebras and in the same year his book Cohomology in Banach algebras (1972) appeared. We mentioned above that Johnson was President of the London Mathematical Society during 1980-82. His presidential address to the Society was on Noncommutative generalisations in mathematics which reported on progress in using ideas from commutative operator theory and applying them to the noncommutative case. Particularly, he reported on applications to noncommutative algebraic topology, noncommutative integration and noncommutative dynamical systems.
In later work on group algebras both for semisimple Lie groups and more general groups, he showed that every derivation is inner.
He is described in [1] as follows:-
Barry Johnson was a highly influential pure mathematician. He liked to work alone, often sitting at home in an armchair with pencil and clipboard, but the theorems he brought to life sometimes had worldwide influence.
He died of cancer aged 64.