Imre Leader
British Othello player (born 1963)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Imre Bennett Leader (born 30 October 1963) is a British mathematician, a professor in DPMMS at the University of Cambridge working in the field of combinatorics. He is also known as an Othello player.
Imre Leader | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 30 October 1963 |
| Alma mater | Cambridge University |
| Awards | Whitehead Prize (1999) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Combinatorics |
| Thesis | Discrete Isoperimetric Inequalities and Other Combinatorial Results (1989) |
| Doctoral advisor | Béla Bollobás |
Life
He is the son of the physicist Elliot Leader and his first wife Ninon Neményi (his mother was previously married to the poet Endre Kövesi); Darian Leader is his brother.[1] Imre Lakatos was a family friend and his godfather.[2]
Leader was educated at St Paul's School in London, from 1976 to 1980.[3] He won a silver medal on the British team at the 1981 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) for pre-undergraduates.[4] He later acted as the official leader of the British IMO team, taking over from Adam McBride in 1999, to 2001.[5][6][7] He was the IMO's Chief Coordinator and Problems Group Chairman in 2002.[8]
Leader went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1984, M.A. in 1989, and Ph.D. in 1989.[9] His Ph.D. in mathematics was for work on combinatorics, supervised by Béla Bollobás.[10] From 1989 to 1996 he was Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, then was Reader at University College London from 1996 to 2000. He was a lecturer at Cambridge from 2000 to 2002, and Reader there from 2002 to 2005.[7] In 2000 he became a Fellow of Trinity College.[11]
Awards and honours
In 1999 Leader was awarded a Junior Whitehead Prize for his contributions to combinatorics. Cited results included the proof, with Reinhard Diestel, of the bounded graph conjecture of Rudolf Halin.[12][13]
Othello
Leader in an interview in 2016 stated that he began to play Othello in 1981, with his friend Jeremy Rickard.[14] In the years from 1982 and 2022 he was 16 times the British Othello champion.[15] In 1983 he came second in the world individual championship, and in 1988 he played on the British team that won the world team championship.[16]
As of 2026, Leader has won the European Grand Prix Championship six times, most recently in 2023.[17]
