Andrew Ranicki

Andrew Alexander Ranicki was a British mathematician who worked on algebraic topology. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.

Ranicki was the only child of the well-known literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki[1] and the artist Teofila Reich-Ranicki; he spoke Polish in his family. Born in London, he lived in Warsaw, in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg, and attended school in England at the King's School, Canterbury from the age of sixteen.

Ranicki studied Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and graduated with a BA in 1969. At Cambridge he was a student of topologists Andrew Casson and John Frank Adams. He earned his doctoral degree in 1973 with a thesis on algebraic L-theory. Ranicki received numerous awards and honors for his scientific achievements during his studies. From 1972 to 1977 he was a Fellow of Trinity College.

From 1977 to 1982, he was Assistant Professor at Princeton University. In 1982 he began at the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer; in 1987 he was promoted to Reader. In 1992, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Since 1995, Ranicki has been the Chair of Algebraic Surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Several times he stayed as a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, most recently in 2011.