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After serving in the Australian Army in WWII, 1943-1945, I received my B.A. (Honours) in the School of Mathematics of Melbourne University in 1947, and my M.A. in 1949, for a thesis entitled The General Theory of Elasticity in Three Dimesions, under Professor Sir Thomas Cherry F.R.S. With a Research Fellowship at Clare College, Cambridge I proceeded to my Ph.D. in 1953 for a thesis entitled Problems in Continuum Mechanics, under Professor Sir Geoffrey Taylor, OM, FRS. Returning to Australia, I worked on structural problems of the Mosquito Bomber as a senior scientific officer at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory of the Department of Defence.
With a Fulbright Fellowship, I accepted in 1956 an invitation by Professor William Prager to join the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, where I have been ever since (as Chairman 1976-82), except for visits to other Universities, once to Stockholm with a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on statistical meteorology. My interests have included scientific computation and problems in statistical inference. Since given an additional appointment in the Department of Community Health in The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, my interests have also included statistical problems in public health and, more recently, in molecular biology. I was instrumental in starting modern scientific computing at Brown (as Director of the Computing Laboratory)and in founding the Center for Statistical Science in the Medical School. I have been Managing Editor of the Quarterly of Applied Mathematics, the first US Applied Mathematics journal, since 1965.

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Demonstrating in 1956 Brown's first computer, an IBM 650