David Trotman

Who is David Trotman?

David John Angelo Trotman is a mathematician, with dual British and French nationality. He was born on September 27, 1951 in Plymouth, Devon, England, a grandson of the poet and author Oliver W F Lodge and a great-grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. He is a leading expert in an area of singularity theory known as the theory of stratifications, and particularly on properties of stratifications satisfying the Whitney conditions and other similar conditions important for understanding topological stability.

At the age of 16, with Philip Crabtree, he was awarded the Explorer Belt in Izmir, Turkey. They were placed second of the seven winning pairs, out of 41 competing teams who walked 150 miles from near Balıkesir to the coast west of Izmir, via Soma and Bergama, in August 1968, undertaking a dozen set projects as they went.

From 1958 to 1962 Trotman attended Gig Mill School, Stourbridge, Worcestershire, where he was in the same class as Kay Partridge, now Dame Kay Davies. He was educated at King Edward's School in Stourbridge, before entering St. John's College, Cambridge in 1969, where he won the John Couch Adams Essay Prize in 1971 for an essay on plane algebraic curves. He carried out doctoral work at the University of Warwick, and the University of Paris-Sud, Orsay. His thesis, entitled Whitney Stratifications : Faults and Detectors, was directed by Christopher Zeeman while at Warwick, and Bernard Teissier and René Thom while at Orsay, although Terry Wall and Robert MacPherson were major influences.