Charles Read

Charles John Read (16 February 1958 – 14 August 2015) was a British mathematician known for his work in functional analysis. In operator theory, he is best known for his work in the 1980s on the invariant subspace problem, where he constructed operators with only trivial invariant subspaces on particular Banach spaces, especially on . He won the 1985 Junior Berwick Prize for his work on the invariant subspace problem. Read has also published on Banach algebras and hypercyclicity; in particular, he constructed the first example of an amenable, commutative, radical Banach algebra. Education and career Read won a scholarship to study mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1975, and was awarded a first-class degree in Mathematics in 1978. He completed his PhD thesis entitled Some Problems in the Geometry of Banach Spaces at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Béla Bollobás. He spent the year 1981–82 at Louisiana State University. From 2000 until his death, he was a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds after having been a fellow of Trinity College for several years. Personal life