26Obituary

Clive Selwyn Davis
15 April 1916 – 29 October 2009
Clive Selwyn Davis, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and former Head ofDepartment at the University of Queensland, died in Brisbane on 29 Octoberat the age of 93 12 years. Clive was born in Sydney and grew up in Strathﬁeld.
He had two brothers, Lionel and Lance, who predeceased him by many years,
and a sister, Audrey Zedora now 96, who, like Clive in recent years, is still
sharp of mind, though frail in body.
Clive was a brilliant child, and was raised by parents who encouraged him todevelop his many talents. He could read by the age of four, and retained alife-long interest in words, language and reading. For many years he learned
two new words per day from the dictionary, and read and memorised many
poems. But he also had a practical bent which ﬁrst showed itself in his loveof tools. His ﬁrst Stanley plane was bought when he was 12 years old, and it
formed the basis of a large collection of wood-working tools. His other notablecollection started with his ﬁrst car, a Crossley, and this was followed by a 1935
Sunbeam and several Rovers. All were kept beneath his house in Corinda — tobe restored in due course.
Clive’s education started at primary schools in Summer Hill and Homebush,and later at Sydney Technical High School. He then enrolled in Engineering
at Sydney University, but found it too practical and transferred to Science.
He obtained a First Class Honours degree in Mathematics in 1937, followed
by First Class Honours in Physics in 1938, and then by an MSc in 1939.
An extracurricular activity followed from his membership of Sydney University
Air Squadron in 1936. He spent many a weekend at Richmond being trainedby the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve, and became an experienced pilot.

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After graduation Clive was employed by the Australian Government, and wassent to England to undertake research on aircraft instruments and aerodynamics at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. Upon the outbreak of
the Second World War, he volunteered for the Royal Air Force, where heserved with distinction, being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in August 1941. He later transferred to the RAAF, and returned to Australia, albeit
with some diﬃculty.
Clive also served on the Air Staﬀ, and he is mentioned in the oﬃcial war
history as being prominent in the development of Operations Research in airoperations. In the later stages of the war, Clive commanded 103 squadronof Liberator heavy bombers in operations from North Queensland and Papua
New Guinea, retiring with the rank of Wing Commander.
After the war, Clive obtained a scholarship to travel to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded his PhD in 1949 for a thesis on number theory
under the supervision of L.J. Mordell. A lectureship at Bristol University wasfollowed by his appointment to the chair of Mathematics at the University ofQueensland in 1956.
Clive served in the Mathematics Department for 27 years until retirement in1983. He was Head of Department from 1956 to 1972, and during these years
he worked hard for a new building for Mathematics, and to build up staﬀ
numbers and to develop courses. Such was the scarcity of qualiﬁed staﬀ atthat time that on one occasion Clive had to travel to Britain and Ireland on arecruiting drive. The total of Mathematics staﬀ in 1956 was 6, compared to 47in 1977. He also fought for a separate Mathematics library in the Mathematics
Department building, which, when it eventuated, was greatly appreciated bystaﬀ. It is now named after him.
Clive Davis was an excellent and stimulating lecturer with a commanding personality. Former students remember the clarity, vigour and high standard of
his lectures. His handwriting on the board was immaculate, and his brief
dictated ﬁnal summary of each lecture was much appreciated.
He was a member of the University Senate for ten years, and during that time
was active in improving staﬀ conditions, including the setting up of the FSSU
superannuation system. He also served on the University Research Committeefor seven years, being Chairman for the last three of those years. In 1966 hewas President of the Royal Society of Queensland. From 1956 to 1968 he wasTreasurer of the Australian Mathematical Society and from 1968 to 1970 was
its President.
To a life of distinction and service Clive added a keen interest in nature andthe environment. He was a founding member of the Barrier Reef Committee,
and of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. He had a keen interestin plants, and especially in growing bromeliads. Also he was a keen and cannysquash player, and continued playing until he was 78.

28Obituary

Clive and Toni were married in May, 1943, in Melbourne. They had threechildren: Dinah, Penny and Julian. Later in life they adopted a young boy,Robert, aged two, who needed a home. They provided him with love and carefor many years, and took him on endless outings. A great tragedy for Toni
and Clive was the death of their son, Julian, in a light-plane crash in 1986.
Toni predeceased Clive on 20 November, 2008, also aged 93 years. Clive is survived by daughters, Dinah and Penny, adopted son Robert, son-in-law Patrick,daughter-in-law Carolyn, 11 grandchildren and ﬁve great-grandchildren.
Clive’s ﬁrst paper appeared in 1945 and was written while he was in the RAAF.
It was an elegant derivation of the regular continued fraction expansions of
e1/k and e2/k , using deﬁnite integrals reminiscent of Hermite’s proof of thetranscendence of e. Clive subsequently went to Cambridge and studied geometry of numbers with L.J. Mordell. This resulted in four papers published in
1948–1951. His 1948 paper disproved a conjecture of Minkowski on the criticaldeterminant of the region |x|p + |y|p < 1 and replaced it by a conjecture thatwas later proved by A.V. Malyshev and A.B. Voronetsky in 1977. His 1950
paper on the minimum of an indeﬁnite binary quadratic form typiﬁed Clive’s
ability to present a topic in its simplest and most elegant form. His Cambridge
PhD, awarded in 1949, was titled The Minimum of a Binary Quartic Formand was published in two papers in Acta Math. in 1951.
Clive was among several bright Cambridge number theory graduates, includingDavid Burgess and Christopher Hooley, who joined the staﬀ at University ofBristol during Hans Heilbronn’s leadership. His arrival in 1956 to take up theheadship of the University of Queensland Mathematics Department resultedin a rejuvenation of the department and of the mathematics library, but also
caused a hiatus in his mathematical publication until 1978–1979, when he returned to a deﬁnitive study of the rational approximations to e. Two notes inthe Gaz. Aust. Math. Soc. were published when Clive was in his eighties.
Clive’s presidential address in Proc. Royal Soc. Queensland 78 (1966), 1–9, isa good example of his clarity of exposition.
R.F.C. Walters (MSc 1967) and K. R. Matthews (MSc 1966, PhD 1974) completed their degrees under his supervision.
Vincent Hart and Keith Matthews
Department of Mathematics, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072