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MICHAEL ATIYAH

9 - Peers from Manchester Grammar School

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[Q] Were there others as good at mathematics as you in Manchester Grammar?

Well, there were. There were some very… Manchester Grammar School recruits very able pupils from a whole wide range and there's a lot of… so there were some very good people. When I came up there were, sort of, three of us got scholarships to Trinity and two got scholarships to St John's and so on. And over the years they've had strings of people and many of them gone on to have quite distinguished [careers]. So in my class there were several others who were… with whom I would compete to be first or second or third. There was by no means you know, a sort of big gap between me and the others. No, they were very… I was under a lot of pressure.

[Q] Did they carry on as mathematicians in later life?

Well of the three that came here, one of them unfortunately was killed in a mountaineering accident. One of them, say, became a mathematician and eventually worked outside in the, sort of, various… he worked, I think, for the nuclear power industry and other forms of applied mathematics, so he probably didn't have as successful a career as one might have predicted from his ability at that stage […] a bit of a luck in the draw, you never know what's going to happen to people. And other mathematicians we've had from the school, subsequently, there are several who have gone on to have quite distinguished academic careers. So it was a good school but there was always a sense that they trained them so well that when they got here, somehow they'd been better trained than everybody else and after a while other people caught up with them, so there was a bit of a sense that sometimes their performance was a little bit disappointing. They were so well prepared, they walked away with all the scholarships but they couldn't be that much better than everybody else, so when they came to university there was a bit of a, sort of, a drop-off and some, you know, would be a bit disappointing.