Thomas Gerald Room

Thomas Gerald Room FRS FAA (10 November 1902 – 2 April 1986) was an Australian mathematician who is best known for Room squares. He was a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

Thomas Room was born on 10 November 1902, near London, England. He studied mathematics in St John's College, Cambridge, and was a wrangler in 1923. He continued at Cambridge as a graduate student, and was elected as a fellow in 1925, but instead took a position at the University of Liverpool. He returned to Cambridge in 1927, at which time he completed his Ph.D., with a thesis supervised by H. F. Baker. Room remained at Cambridge until 1935, when he moved to the University of Sydney. During World War II he worked for the Australian government, helping to decrypt Japanese communications. After the war, Room returned to the University of Sydney, where he was dean of the faculty of science from 1952 to 1956 and again from 1960 to 1965. He also held visiting positions at the University of Washington in 1948, and the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University in 1957. He retired from Sydney in 1968 but took short-term positions afterwards at Westfield College in London and the Open University before returning to Australia in 1974. He died on 2 April 1986.

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