XClose

Library Services

Menu

C. A. B. Smith Archive

Digitised content from the archive of C. A. B. Smith. This material was digitised as part of the Wellcome Library’s project "Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics" in 2011.

Browse the C. A. B. Smith Archive

Collection contents

Digitised copies of material from the archive of Cedric Austen Bardell Smith, comprising personal papers, articles on colour vision, lectures and publications and a small amount of other correspondence. A full, detailed catalogue is available on UCL’s archives and manuscripts online database (Ref: MS ADD 426). The collection can be viewed in person by making an appointment with our Reader Services team.

About C. A. B. Smith

Image from the C A B Smith Archive
Smith studied mathematics at Cambridge, receiving his PhD in 1942. During this time he formed the "Trinity Mathematical Society" with fellow students R. L. Brooks, A. H. Stone and W. T. Tutte. Together they tackled many obscure mathematical problems, most famously "the squaring of the square", and began to publish poems and stories under the pseudonym "Blanche Descartes". Articles attributed to this imaginary Frenchwoman were mostly in the form of whimsical poetry or mathematical humour, but some serious results of work on mathematical tesselation were also published, and continued to appear until the 1980s.

In 1946 he was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship at the Galton Laboratory at University College London. He was soon influenced by J. B. S. Haldane, who introduced him to problems of linkage in human genetics. Their collaboration produced a joint paper in 1947 on the linkage between colour-blindness and haemophilia in man. He remained at the Galton Laboratory for the rest of his career, succeeding Haldane as Weldon Professor of Biometry in 1964.

Smith made many important contributions to genetics and biometry, including a test for mimic loci, sex-specific analysis based on recombination, segregation ratios in family data, population structure, and genetic correlation.

Links

UCL Digital Collections