A Death is always a sad occasion especially when it comes un­expectedly. However this tribute is given in the spirit of reflec­tion and celebration of the life and achievements of Dr. Stanley Richardson.

Stan was born in Lower Withington, Macclesfield in 1943. He was educated at Macclesfield until he went up to Cambridge to read Mathematics in 1961. His entire University education took place at Cambridge and he graduated with B.A. (1964) M.A. & Ph.D.(1968). In 1968 he became an Assistant Lecturer at Manchester (UMIST). He then returned to Cambridge for two years as a Postdoc. Finally he was appointed to Edinburgh in 1971.

In his early years he was a keen cyclist, famously travelling to and from his Cambridge interview by bike. He was also an enthusiastic racing cyclist. I remember him recounting his ex­periences of several 24 hour cycling races. During the race it was essential to eat regularly and his favourite morsel was cold rice pudding. One of his tales starts with the memorable line "After 300 miles my feet began to ache ... " His cure was to have strategically placed along the route, members of his sup­port team armed with buckets of cold water. Stan on reaching these would come to a screeching halt, jump off his bike, leap into the bucket, and allow his feet to cool off, before setting off again. This certainly proved to be effective as his best result was 453.2 miles, not far from the then world record and not far short of the three longest stages of the Tour De France joined together.

When Stan moved to Edinburgh, the applied side of the depart­ment, often referred to as Technical Mathematics, already sta­tioned at K.B., moved into the newly built JCMB (opened 1971) and he was one of the first occupants. I had been appointed one year earlier and my office for the first year was in what was actually a converted cinema at the corner of Drummond street and Roxburgh street.

At this time the JCMB building was at most 1/2 of the size it is today and finished at the end of what is now the Geology lab on the 6th level at the east end of the South facing side of the building. In 1971 this lab was a communal coffee room and there were good interdepartmental relations with everyone meeting and talking over coffee. In these earlier years I remember him the heart and soul of the building. When everyone met for coffee he always came armed with pen, paper and what I called a ten minute problem. He would then say, "did you know this? do you think this is an interesting result?". The answers inevitably being no followed by yes.

He married Jan in 1973 and bought a house in "the Spinney'. He lived there for about 2 years. During this time they had both become less than enamoured with the house. So they decided to sell the house, leave Edinburgh, buy a house in Stow and settle in the Borders, where they resided ever since. He was promoted to reader in 1995 and was due to retire in September this year.

In 2006 a conference was organised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. The proceedings of this conference were written up in a special edition of the journal Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, namely Volume 235, Issues 1-2 pp. 1-206 (November 2007), sub­titled Physics and Mathematics of Growing Interface: In honor of Stan Richardson's discoveries in Laplacian Growth and related free boundary problem. One of his early papers on this subject appeared in JFM in 1972. It was entitled "HELE SHAW FLOWS WITH A FREE BOUNDARY PRODUCED BY INJECTION OF FLUID INTO A NARROW CHANNEL" and to date has been cited 187 times. I quote from the preface to this edition. "During the week of January 9-13 2006, most of the contrib­utors of this volume met in Santa Fe at a workshop to report and discuss recent advances in the field we call "growing inter­faces" and to assess their future development. The workshop was devoted to seminal discoveries made in interface dynamics by Stan Richardson, whose pioneering papers on free boundaries in a HeleShaw cell formed a mathematical shape of the modern integrable interface dynamics. His wonderful findings paved the way for all recent advances in the integrable structure of inter­face dynamics and its connections with integrable hierarchies and quantum gravity. This special issue of Physica D should be considered as a token of appreciation of Stan Richardson's works. It can also be viewed as an account of major directions in growing interfaces addressed in this workshop amidst hot and stimulating discussions. " This is a comment on the international reputation and respect he commanded and should have made him very proud.

One of the students who is now at Cambridge studying part 3 took Stan's course, Further Complex Analysis, last year. He recently returned to, Edinburgh and made the following remark about Stan's course. "I have found this year that I was under prepared for all courses (in part 3) with the exception of Complex Analysis. I found that in this area I was further ahead than any of my fellow students". Stan was very pleased and proud to hear this.

Since the announcement of his death last week I have had many tributes from students along the lines of "Stan was a remarkable example of University teaching at its best." He would have been proud to receive such accolades from his students and of the high esteem in which many of his colleagues held him.