by Carla Ranicki
My father, Andrew Alexander Ranicki (originally Andrzej Aleksander), was born in London in 1948, the only child of Marcel and Teofila (known as Tosia) Reich-Ranicki, Polish-German Jews who had survived the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and been hidden by a Polish family until the arrival of the Russian army. His mother’s father had committed suicide in the ghetto, and his remaining grandparents and uncle were all killed in the camps.
His parents returned to Warsaw after his birth and he lived in Poland until the age of 10, when the increasingly untenable political situation forced them to leave the country illegally and seek refuge in, of all places, Germany. My grandfather had been sent to school in Berlin before the war, and there he developed a passion for German literature. He worked as a journalist at Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, eventually becoming the country’s most famous literary critic and presenting a television show about books, “Das Literarisches Quartett”, for many years. His autobiography, Mein Leben, was a bestseller, translated into 16 languages.
Marcel’s cousin, Frank Auerbach, had been sent from Berlin to England in 1939 at the age of 8, and also excelled in his field, becoming a world-renowned painter, one of the School of London, along with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. After leaving Poland, my grandmother suffered from depression, and for some time my father was sent to school in London, when he stayed with his aunt Gerda, who had managed to escape Berlin with her husband in September 1939. He also attended the International School in Hamburg, before transferring to King’s School in Canterbury at the age of 16 to prepare for the Cambridge University entrance exam for mathematics.
After gaining his BA from Trinity College in 1969, he then completed his PhD there in 1973 with a thesis on algebraic \( L \)-theory, supervised by Andrew Casson and Frank Adams, two formative influences on him. He was a Fellow of Trinity College between 1972 and 1977, and then an assistant professor at Princeton University from 1977 until 1982. It was at Princeton that he met my mother, Ida Thompson, then an Assistant Professor in the Geosciences Department. They were the first two Princeton professors to marry, in October 1979 at the top of Fine Hall, home to the Mathematics Department, and I was born shortly afterwards, in December. In 1982 my father was hired as a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and taught there until his retirement in 2016. He was appointed to the specially created Chair of Algebraic Surgery in 1995, a title which pleased him immensely, especially when explained to medical doctors.
He held visiting positions at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Kentucky, the University of Göttingen and the University of California San Diego. He was awarded Cambridge University Smith’s Prize (1972), the Junior Whitehead Prize (1983) and the Senior Berwick Prize (1994) of the London Mathematical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1992.
He particularly enjoyed supervising graduate students, and saw 11 of them obtain their PhDs. Over the course of his career, he wrote around 80 articles, authored seven books, and edited some dozen proceedings. His final book, The Geometric Hopf Invariant and Surgery Theory [◊], coauthored with Michael Crabb, was published just a few weeks before his death. It was dedicated to my son, Nico Marcel Vallauri, who was born in 2015, and who knew him as “Grandrew”, as did the four children of his stepchildren, Matthew and Alice Thompson, my mother’s son and daughter from a previous marriage. The same year as Nico’s birth my father was diagnosed with myelodysplasia, which eventually developed into acute myeloid leukaemia, and he died peacefully just after midnight on the 21st February 2018, with my mother at his side. His name lives on in my second son, who he sadly never met; Alex Andrew Vallauri was born in February 2020. More about Andrew, his work and his family can be found at his personal website, which he carefully curated: www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/.
After studying English at University College London and journalism at Columbia University, Carla Ranicki worked for food magazines in New York before moving to Italy, where she met her husband, Ugo Vallauri. She now works as an Italian-English translator and lives in London.
