Renfrey B. Potts

Brief Biography

Renfrey Burnard Potts was an Australian mathematician who made significant contributions to transportation science and statistical mechanics. Born in South Australia, Potts went to college in his home town at the University of Adelaide. He was an avid sportsman, playing tennis, hockey, squash, and badminton. Potts was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Queen’s College, Oxford. He remained at Oxford for his doctorate. His dissertation introduced the Potts model, a generalization of the Ising Model in statistical mechanics.

Potts returned to Adelaide as a Lecturer in Mathematics before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto in Canada. During his time in North America, Potts became a consultant to General Motors in Detroit, Michigan, where he joined a team lead by Robert Herman. With General Motors, Potts was part of a traffic researcher group that included Denos Gazis, Elliott W. Montroll, Robert E. Chandler, Richard Rothery, and Herman. This group of six men wrote a trio of articles for Operations Research on the subject of traffic dynamics and traffic flow. The three papers were awarded the 1959 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best publication in operations research from that year. They were lauded for the representation of “a fruitful application of a rich body of mathematical theory persuasively supported by experimental and computational evidence.” Potts co-authored two of the three papers and played an important role in the discovery of the identical equation for steady-state behavior of vehicular traffic. That year’s award set a precedent for the prize selection Committee to encourage the publication of series of papers reporting to a single research agenda as it progresses.

In 1959, Potts returned to Australia when he was appointed the newly created chair in applied mathematics at Adelaide. He stayed with the university for the remainder of his career, retiring from active professorship in 1990. In that time, he continued his work in transportation science, publishing a book on addressing key transportation issues in Australia.

Potts had an active role in the professional scientific and applied mathematics community of Australia. From 1978 to 1979, he served as chairman of the Australian Mathematical Society Division of Applied Mathematics. He was a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society, an Officer in the Order of Australia, and was awarded the first Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics Medal. In 2001, the Australian Government awarded him the Centenary Medal for “service to Australian society and science in operations research.” Potts passed away in 2005.  

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for Refrey Potts

University of St. Andrews School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences. Potts Biography. Accessed June 9, 2015. (link)