Charles Read (mathematician)

An article in The Gryphon, the Leeds University Student Union newspaper in February 2015 stated that Read had "sparked controversy" by stating that at the end of his testimony: "‘I strongly urge you to seek the truth as a researcher, not trusting anyone else to do your basic investigations for you. That’s right, Jesus is the Way. But you have to find that out for yourself. For those who seek find, but those who can’t be bothered, or who think they’re too cool, end in a very dark place. It won't be cool in Hell.’"

Read died in Winnipeg in August 2015 while on a research visit at the University of Manitoba.

Read subsequently displayed on his website a scanned image of the original article, under which a handwritten comment notes that "Leeds Gryphon, 13-2-15 notices Christian Testimony of CJR after several years!"

Read won a scholarship to study mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1975, and was awarded a first-class degree in Mathematics in 1978. He completed his PhD thesis entitled Some Problems in the Geometry of Banach Spaces at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Béla Bollobás. He spent the year 1981–82 at Louisiana State University.At the time of his death, he was a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds after having been a fellow of Trinity for several years.

He described losing his father to cancer in 1970 when he was 11 years old, and that this loss prompted him to ask questions about whether, and in what form, we might continue to live after we die - and that consciousness may be independent of the body. He came to the conclusion that the conscious mind must survive after death. This also led him to believe that since we are "immortal beings" that we must always try to "do the right thing".

Charles John Read (16 February 1958 – 14 August 2015) was a British mathematician known for his work in functional analysis. In operator theory, he is best known for his work in the 1980s on the invariant subspace problem, where he constructed operators with only trivial invariant subspaces on particular Banach spaces, especially on ℓ 1 {\displaystyle \ell _{1}} . He won the 1985 Junior Berwick Prize for his work on the invariant subspace problem.