Barrie Thomas Evans

Prof Barrie Jones

Dear Editor, It was with great sadness that we learnt of the death of Prof Barrie Jones on 19 August 2009 in Tauranga, New Zealand, aged 88. He was admired worldwide for his work in developing the concept of prevention of blindness and for establishing the International Centre for Eye Health (publishers of the Community Eye Health Journal) in 1981. He was in fact responsible for encouraging the...

Uranium Glass By Barrie Skelcher

The chemistry textbooks tell us that uranium was discovered by the German chemist, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, in 1789, which is perhaps a simplification of the truth. The element was named after the planet Uranus and what Klaproth reported to the Royal Prussian Academy of Science in that year was uranium oxide, which he had separated from the heavy, black mineral known as pitchblende. The elemen...

Remembrances of Things past Barrie Jay, Editor

On November 29, 1949, Harold Ridley implanted the first intraocular lens (IOL). This marked the beginning of a major change in the practice of ophthalmology and, for Ridley, the beginning of an era of inspiration, reward and challenge, unfortunately marred by the disdain and discourteous actions of many colleagues within the academic establishment in Europe and the United States. By the late 19...

Thank Evans!

In this paper we give a complete solution to the conjecture of Evans made in 1960 that if n— 1 cells of an nxn matrix are preassigned with no element repeated in any row or column then the remaining n — n+ 1 cells can be filled so as to produce a latin square. We in fact prove the stronger statement that n cells can be preassigned except in certain cases which we specify.

The Gears of Genius : Barrie Gilbert and Analog Circuits