Colleagues from the University, past and present, gathered to say a fond farewell to Professor Stephen Linton who is retiring from the School at the end of 2024. Steve was a valuable and respected member of staff for 31 years and also a former Head of School and Director of CIRCA.
Steve was fundamental in building our collaboration with colleagues in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, serving as Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra (CIRCA) for many years. CIRCA has been the platform for nearly 25 years of fruitful collaboration between the two Schools, producing an internationally recognised body of work spanning both research papers and software. Steve played a central role in building and sustaining the Centre, supporting it with a substantial EPSRC Platform Grant in 2010.
As Head of School, Steve was always generous in helping those around him progress, even allowing staff to study for a law degree during research leave!
Below are some tributes from colleagues/friends:-
Professor Ian Gent: “Steve is one of those programmers who is 10 times better than other people who are themselves really good programmers. The story of one of the coffee area’s Go boards illustrates this. The school hosted an afternoon programming competition open to teams of 3. Steve entered by himself having been assured that his favourite programming language GAP was available. When that turned out to be wrong he just used C instead. And then very comfortably won the programming competition solving more problems than any of the groups of three. A Head of School, he didn’t want to benefit personally from the prize so bought the school a Go board.
Nobody will argue with the statement that the smartest person in the school is retiring. When I used to research with him, people often asked me how I coped with working with somebody so ridiculously clever. My reply was “because I’m working WITH him” the advantage being that you weren’t competing! A classic example of this was when we had a paper rejected because reviewers didn’t think the work was novel despite depending on amazing algorithms Steve had coded up. In making sure the revision emphasised the novelty, Steve said “But any one of two dozen people could have done it” and I said “Yes and if any one of them had done, it would have been novel!” The revised paper got accepted and has just hit 100 citations on Google Scholar.”
Professor Tom Kelsey: “Steve, Ian Gent and I – had a research meeting with Colva Roney-Dougal at which we agreed that there were two distinct coding tasks, one for Steve, the other for Ian and me, both quite challenging. Ian and I started work on the whiteboard outside Steve’s office, planning how we might go about writing and evaluating our code. After 25 minutes detailed discussion, we’d made good progress and had the kernel of a plan that would give us plenty of work for the rest of the week. Steve came out of his office having finished his task in one short attempt – the resulting paper used this code without revision. Ian and I felt like a pair of numbskulls.
On a more personal note, I was Steve’s first PhD student. During my studies one of my daughters became quite unwell, and dealing with her complex treatments and the other four children didn’t leave much time for my Doctoral studies. Steve was incredibly supportive, dealing with the School and University in such a way that all I had to worry about was my daughter’s wellbeing. When I returned I was still very much focussed on family issues, but Steve guided me expertly and kindly through the rest of my studies. For which I am eternally grateful.”
Professor Graham Kirby: “Steve is compassionate and understanding. I was a newish DoT at a time when my wife was seriously ill, and I was responsible for writing the school’s institutional teaching review document. As HoS, Steve found ways to alleviate the real or perceived pressure on me, enabling me to focus on family.”
Professor Chris Jefferson: “Steve also contributed to many major research projects, in particular GAP. GAP is a mathematics system, which has been actively developed since 1988. While GAP is maintained by academics from around the world, St Andrews computing and mathematics, led by Steve, took over the leadership of GAP from RWTH Aachen in 1997, and lead GAP until 2022. In that time, many students and academics at St Andrews have been involved with GAP.”
Professor Karen Petrie (University of Dundee and University of St Andrews graduate 2000): “Steve has had a very lasting impression on me from my UG days when he was my tutor. I first met him in 1st year in C programming tutorials. I remember having my first ever memory leak in those days and Steve making all the hours which I spent fixing it better when he told me ‘now you are a computer sciemtist’. He also taught me the difference between P and NP, I remember being amazed to learn that P vs NP was an open problem, the very idea of open problems was new to me and incredibly exciting but challenging. He was also extremely compassionate I remember in my 4th year I had tonsillitis and Steve asked me why I was in University and sent me home to bed. He told me he did not want to see me until I could speak again! One of the amazing things about Steve is his practical coding ability and his theoretical ability as a student he felt like the rock star of CS, that impression of him has never changed. This means a kind word from him means a lot as we all want to emanate him. As an example as a PhD student we were working on a joint research paper as research does, it was not going well, so we were debugging code together. It had been a long trying day. Steve made it all better by telling me ‘you now debug code as well as I do’. Now, I am a professor myself and I try to do the same for my students as Steve did for me: to challenge them when appropriate, to be compassionate when that is what they need but most importantly always to treat them as an equal. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to call Steve not just a mentor, nor a collaborator but a friend.”
All at CS would like to wish Steve a long and happy retirement 🎉
Alex Bain (School Manager), Professor Steve Linton, Professor Ian Miguel (Head of School)
Professor Ian Miguel (HoS) and Professor Ron Morrison (former HoS)
Dr Tristan Henderson, Professor Steve Linton
