Peter M. Neumann

Peter Michael Neumann OBE (28 December 1940 – 18 December 2020) was a British mathematician. His fields of interest included the history of mathematics and Galois theory.
Biography.
Born in 1940, he was a son of the German-born mathematicians Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann. He gained a BA degree from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1963, and a DPhil degree from Oxford University in 1966.
Neumann was a Tutorial Fellow at the Queen's College, Oxford, and a lecturer at Oxford University. His research work was in the field of group theory. 
In 1987, Neumann won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for his review of Harold Edwards' book "Galois Theory".
He was the first Chairman of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust, from October 1996 to April 2004, succeeded by Bernard Silverman.
He showed in 1997 that Alhazen's problem (reflecting a light ray off a spherical mirror to hit a target) cannot be solved with Euclidean ruler-and-compass. Although the solution is a straightforward application of Galois theory it closes one of the last remaining geometric construction problems posed in antiquity. 
After retiring in 2008, he became an Emeritus Fellow at the Queen's College. 
In 2003, the London Mathematical Society awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.
Neumann's work in the history of mathematics includes his 2011 publication "The Mathematical Writings of Evariste Galois", an English language book of the work of by French mathematician Évariste Galois (1811–1832). Neumann was a long-standing supporter of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, whose Neumann Prize is named in his honour.
Neumann was the president of the Mathematical Association from 2015 to 2016.
Neumann died on 18 December 2020 of COVID-19.
Personal life.
Neumann married Sylvia Bull in 1962. She was a fellow mathematics undergraduate at Oxford, where they met.