Francis Allotey

Francis Allotey was born in Saltpond, on the coast of what was then the Gold Coast, in 1932. His father kept a general store that also sold books, and the boy read whatever science came through the door. There was no obvious path from there to a career in physics: the colony had no university until he was in his teens, and mathematical physics was not a subject anyone around him had heard of.

He got to London in the 1950s and took a diploma at Imperial College, then went to Princeton for a doctorate, which he completed in 1966. His thesis work on the way soft X-rays interact with the electrons in metals became known as the Allotey formalism, and it is still cited by people who have never heard of the man or his country.

He could have stayed in the United States. He went back to Kumasi instead, to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, where he built up the mathematics department from very little and pushed for computing at a time when Ghana had almost none. He spent decades arguing, in committee rooms and at conferences, that African countries needed their own mathematicians and physicists rather than imported expertise.

He founded institutes, chaired the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, and helped set up the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Ghana. He was still lecturing in his eighties, and died in Accra in 2017.