| Description | <p>Papers of C A B Smith, arranged in four sections. A précis of each section is given below:</p>
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<p>The first section contains papers relating to the life, work, and character of Smith. The first series (MS ADD 426/A/1) contains material about Smith assembled by friends, colleagues and peers, primarily in contribution to an obituary, and his candidature for election to the Royal Society. It also contains a quasi-autobiographical work (actually a biography of the fictional mathematician Blanche Descartes), and papers referring to Smith's academic legacy, being a programme for a symposium on Smith's work on linkage analysis, and correspondence about his personal archive. Other series in this section relate to Smith's work prior to and outside his position at UCL, including his PhD thesis, correspondence with the Skinners on "squared squares", papers of Charles H Henshaw, notes on number theory and topology, and papers relating to the work of the Conflict Research Society.</p>
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<p>The second section contains articles accumulated by Smith relating to colour vision, arranged in rough alphabetical order by author or topic.</p>
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<p>The third section contains drafts, offprints and lectures by Smith. The first series (MS ADD 426/C/1) of drafts comprises manuscript and typescript drafts of reviews and articles, and first proofs of reviews and articles (there are draft and proof versions of most of the articles present in this series). The second series (MS ADD 426/C/2) contains a set of offprints bearing index numbers (relating to an index in MS ADD 426/A/1/7), a set of unnumbered offprints, and press cuttings featuring published letters by Smith. The third series is slight, and contains bound copies of a lecture and an address by Smith.</p>
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<p>The fourth section contains correspondence divided into two series. The first series (MS ADD 426/D/1) contains general correspondence, mainly with J H Edwards about Edwards' manuscripts, but also miscellaneous papers and letters relating to meetings of scientific societies, work, and circular letters to friends of the Smith family. The second series (MS ADD 426/D/2) comprises correspondence of J H Renwick, principally with L S Penrose and C A Clarke. The Renwick correspondence is not related to Smith.</p> |
| AdminHistory | <p>Cedric Austen Bardell Smith was born in Leicester on 5 Feburary 1917. After education at Wyggeston Boys School, Leicester, and University College School, London, he was awarded an exhibition to Trinity College Cambridge in 1935. He graduated in the Mathematical Tripos, achieving a First in Part II and a Distinction in Part III. He followed this with postgraduate research in statistics, taking his PhD in 1942.</p>
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<p>While at Cambridge, Smith became one of a close-knit group of four students - the others were R L Brooks, A H Stone and W T Tutte - who formed the Trinity Mathematical Society. Together they tackled many obscure mathematical problems, most famously the one known as "the squaring of the square", and began to publish poems and amusing stories under the pseudonym "Blanche Descartes". Articles attributed to this imaginary Frenchwoman were mostly in the form of whimsical poetry or mathematical humour, but some serious results of work in the area of mathematical tesselation were also published, and continued to appear until the 1980s.</p>
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<p>During the Second World War, Smith, as a conscientious objector, worked as a porter at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge and also joined the Friends Relief Service. In 1946 he was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship at the Galton Laboratory at University College London. He was soon influenced by J B S Haldane, who introduced him to problems of linkage in human genetics. Their collaboration produced a joint paper in 1947 on the linkage between colour-blindness and haemophilia in man. He remained at the Galton Laboratory for the rest of his career, succeeding Haldane as Weldon Professor of Biometry in 1964.</p>
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<p>Smith made many important contributions to genetics including the most powerful test for mimic loci, which produce what appears to be the same disease but are located in different chromosome regions and act in different ways. With J H Renwick he pioneered sex-specific analysis based on the observation that chromosomes recombine at different points in male and female meiosis. Smith's 1953 paper introduced autozygosity mapping based on co-inheritance of a rare disease gene and close markers in relatives. The method lay fallow for thirty years, waiting for the molecular markers that have made it invaluable. Smith's best ideas were incorporated in genetic mapping, becoming a precious tool for clinical genetics and the impetus for the Human Genome Project.</p>
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<p>In statistical genetics he also made wide-ranging contributions to classical topics such as segregation ratios in family data, kinship, population structure, assortative mating, genetic correlation, and estimation of gene frequencies. With Ceppellini and Siniscalco in 1955 he introduced the method of gene counting, now used to advantage for many missing-data problems in which some observations are mixtures of discrete probabilities.</p>
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<p>Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1945 and a Fellow of the International Statistical Institute in 1963. He was a member of the Genetical Society (serving as Treasurer) and the International Biometric Society (British Region), serving as President in the years 1971-1972. His principal editorial work was as long-standing co-editor of the 'Annals of Human Genetics'.</p>
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<p>As a Quaker and a pacifist, Smith was involved with the work of the Society of Friends and was a member of the Quaker Peace Studies Trust which established the chair of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. The mathematical analysis of war deeply interested him and led to his taking a major role in the founding of the Conflict Research Society. He served this organisation as Chairman for many years, later becoming President.</p>
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<p>Smith married Piroska (known as "Piri") Vermes in 1957. He died in 2002.</p>
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<p>UCL Special Collections acknowledges the obituary of C A B Smith by N E Morton in the 'International Statistical Institute Newsletter (vol. 26., no. 2, 2002) as the source of information about the significance of Smith's contribution to modern genetical research.</p> |