Robert McCredie May

Bob May was a self-effacing, straight-talking polymath. Described as a ‘professor of everything’, he had great strengths in chemical engineering, physics, mathematics, ecology, zoology and finance.

His long and distinguished academic career has included appointments as Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University, 1989-1995; Professor of Biology at Princeton University, 1973-1988; and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Sydney University, 1970-1972. Throughout his career, he has made major advances in the field of population biology by the application of mathematical techniques and has played a key role in the development of theoretical ecology through the 1970s and 1980s.

He was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government 1995-2000 and President of the Royal Society 2000-2005. 

He was knighted in 1996 for services to Science and received an AC in 1998 for service to science and scientific research, particularly in the area of biological conservation involving the interaction between population, resources and the environment, to scholarship and to the formulation of science policy. He was appointed to the House of Lords in 2001 with the style “Baron May of Oxford”.

In 2002, Bob received the Order of Merit, a British honour established as a special distinction for people of the highest eminence. The order is limited to 24 living people.

His many other honours include: the Royal Swedish Academy’s Crafoord Prize (for bioscience and ecology); the Swiss-Italian Balzan Prize (for “seminal contributions to [understanding] biodiversity”); and the Japanese Blue Planet Prize (“for developing fundamental tools for ecological conservation planning”).

In 2007 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, the world’s oldest prize for scientific achievement. The last High Old Boy to win this medal was Sir John Cornforth (1933), who like Lord May was taught science by Lenny Basser.