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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Truss

Born April 1947 (age 75)

Alma mater King's College, Cambridge

University of Leeds

Children 4; including Liz Truss

Scientific career
 Fields Pure mathematics

Institutions Paisley College of Technology

University of Leeds

John Kenneth Truss (born April 1947) is a mathematician and emeritus

professor of pure mathematics at the University of Leeds where he specialises in
mathematical logic; infinite permutation groups; homogeneous structures and model
theory.[1] Truss began his career as a junior research fellow at the University of
Oxford before holding a series of academic positions and lastly joining the University of
Leeds. He has written books on discrete mathematics (1991) and mathematical analysis
(1997) and was co-editor in chief of the Journal of the London Mathematical
Society until June 2003. He is the father of the former Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom, Liz Truss.

Early life and family[edit]

John Truss was born in April 1947.[2][3] He graduated from King's College, Cambridge in
1968 and earned his PhD at the University of Leeds in 1973 for a dissertation titled
"Some Results about Cardinal Numbers without the Axiom of Choice" which was
supervised by Frank Drake.[4] In 1969, he married Priscilla Mary Grasby, a nurse, [5] who
he had met while they were students at Cambridge. [5] Together, they have a
daughter, Liz Truss, and three sons.[6] Liz Truss has described her parents' politics as "to
the left of Labour".[7] Truss and his wife were both supporters of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament.[8] They divorced in 2003.[5]

Career[edit]
Truss's first academic position was as a junior research fellow at the Mathematical
Institute of the University of Oxford.[9] He then taught at a school in Kidderminster,
[10]
 Worcestershire, before lecturing at Paisley College of Technology from 1979 to 1985.
[5]
 In 1987, he worked at Simon Fraser University[11] in British Columbia, Canada, and
later at the University of Leeds where in 1988 with Frank Drake he edited the collected
papers of Logic Colloquium '86, held at the University of Hull in 1986.[12]
In 1990, Peter Cameron paid tribute to Truss in his notes on Oligomorphic Permutation
Groups in the London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes Series No. 152, for saving
him from "making some rash conjectures (by disproving them)", and "notably" for his
contribution to the question of what are the possible cycle structures
of automorphisms of M?[13] In 1991, Truss published Discrete Mathematics for Computer
Scientists which John Bayliss described in The Mathematical Gazette as "masterful and
thorough" and getting "rapidly to the heart of some very exciting topics" but felt that it
was more of a mathematician's book than a book for computer scientists as claimed by
the author. Nonethless, Bayliss felt that the approach taken by Truss in organising and
presenting his material was highly successful in condensing different strands of
mathematics so that the author had shown that "discrete mathematics has come of age
and is no longer a collection of disparate topics." [14]
In 1999, Truss and S. Barry Cooper, also of the University of Leeds, jointly edited two
volumes of papers in the London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes Series arising
from the European meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic in Leeds in July 1997
on sets and proofs[15][16] and models and computability.[15] The volumes were welcomed by
philosopher Graham Priest of the University of Queensland who noted that they
concentrated on logic as practiced in mathematics departments with little content of a
philosophical or computer science nature, but, possibly as a result, were more coherent
than usual for collections of conference papers.[15] By then, Truss and Jonathan
Partington were co-editors of the Journal of the London Mathematical Society.[17] They
were succeeded on 6 June 2003 by Francis Burstall and John Toland.[18]
In 2014, Sam Tarzi's Multicoloured Random Graphs: Constructions and Symmetry,
prepared with Peter Cameron, made extensive use of Truss's research, noting that
Truss had proved that countable universal edge-coloured graphs have simple
automorphism groups. A summary of Truss's work in this area was included as
appendix A(8) of Tarzi's work.[19]

Selected publications[edit]
Books[edit]
 Truss, J. K. (1991). Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists. Addison-
Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-17564-6.[14]
 Truss, J. K. (1997). Foundations of Mathematical Analysis. Clarendon
Press. ISBN 978-0-19-853375-7.
Edited volumes[edit]
 Drake, Frank Robert; Truss, J. K., eds. (1988). Logic Colloquium '86: Proceedings of
the Colloquium Held in Hull, U.K. July 13-19, 1986. North-Holland Publishing
Company. ISBN 978-0-444-70326-2.
 Cooper, S. Barry; Truss, J. K., eds. (1999). Sets and Proofs: Invited Papers from
Logic Colloquium '97, European Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic,
Leeds, July 1997. Cambridge University
Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107325944. ISBN 978-1-139-88244-6.
 Cooper, S. Barry; Truss, John K., eds. (1999). Models and Computability. London
Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511565670. ISBN 978-0-521-63550-9.
Journal articles[edit]
 Truss, J. K. (September 1985). "The group of the countable universal
graph". Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. 98 (2):
213–245. Bibcode:1985MPCPS..98..213T. doi:10.1017/S0305004100063428. ISSN 
1469-8064. S2CID 122772888.
  Truss, J. K. (February 1989). "Infinite permutation groups II. Subgroups of small
index". Journal of Algebra. 120 (2): 494–515. doi:10.1016/0021-8693(89)90212-3.
 Truss, J. K. (July 1992). "Generic Automorphisms of Homogeneous
Structures". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. s3-65 (1): 121–
141. doi:10.1112/plms/s3-65.1.121.
 Truss, J. K. (June 1995). "The structure of amorphous sets". Annals of Pure and
Applied Logic. 73 (2): 191–233. doi:10.1016/0168-0072(94)00024-W. ISSN 0168-
0072.
 Creed, P.; Truss, J. K. (3 February 2000). "On o-amorphous sets". Annals of Pure
and Applied Logic. 101 (2): 185–226. doi:10.1016/S0168-0072(99)00017-
2. ISSN 0168-0072.
 Creed, P.; Truss, J. K. (1 November 2001). "On quasi-amorphous sets". Archive for
Mathematical Logic. 40 (8): 581–
596. doi:10.1007/s001530100074. S2CID 16999253.

References[edit]
1. ^ "Professor J K Truss | School of Mathematics | University of Leeds".  eps.leeds.ac.uk.
Archived from  the original on 23 February 2022. Retrieved 7 September  2022.
2. ^ Truss, J. K., Library of Congress. Retrieved 15 September 2022.
3. ^ Virtual International Authority File. Retrieved 15 September 2022.
4. ^ John Kenneth Truss. Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 12 September 2022.
5. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Grylls, Andrew Norfolk, Charlotte Wace, George. "Liz Truss: from teenage
Lib Dem to darling of the Tory right".  The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved  7
September  2022.
6. ^ Josh Glancy; Hugo Daniel (3 September 2022). "Just where is Liz Truss from? Her
incredible journey spans three countries and two continents". The Times.  Archived  from the
original on 4 September 2022. Retrieved  6 September 2022.
7. ^ Quinn, Ben (5 September 2022). "How Liz Truss became leader of the Conservative party –
a timeline".  The Guardian.
8. ^ How Liz Truss, Britain's next prime minister, went from anti-monarchist rebel to the next
Margaret Thatcher. Jack Hawke, ABC News, 5 September 2022. Retrieved 7 September
2022.
9. ^ "Models of set theory containing many perfect sets", Ann. Math. Logic 7, 197–219 (1974).
10. ^ Where in Oxford is Liz Truss from? Miranda Norris, Oxford Mail, 6 September 2022.
Retrieved 12 September 2022.
11. ^ Chan, Cheryl (6 September 2022). "New U.K. prime minister Liz Truss attended school in
Burnaby".  Vancouver Sun. Retrieved 6 September  2022.
12. ^ Skowron, Andrzej (1989). "Review of Logic Colloquium '86".  Studia Logica. 48 (3): 396–
400.  ISSN  0039-3215. JSTOR 20015451.
13. ^ Cameron, Peter J. (1990). Oligomorphic Permutation Groups. London Mathematical Society
Lecture Notes Series No. 152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. v, 3, 86, 104.
ISBN 0-521-38836-8
14. ^ Jump up to:a b Baylis, John (1992). "Review of Discrete Mathematics for Computer
Scientists". The Mathematical Gazette.  76  (476): 303–
305.  doi:10.2307/3619163.  ISSN  0025-5572. JSTOR 3619163.
15. ^ Jump up to:a b c Priest, Graham (2001). "Review of Sets and Proofs; Models and
Computability, S. Barry Cooper, John K. Truss". Studia Logica.  69  (3): 446–448.  ISSN  0039-
3215.  JSTOR  20016368.
16. ^ Cantini, Andrea (2002). "Review of First Steps into Metapredicativity in Explicit
Mathematics".  The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. 8  (4): 535–
536.  doi:10.2307/797965. ISSN 1079-8986.  JSTOR  797965.
 17. ^ "Journal of the London Mathematical Society". Archived from  the original on 13 September
1999.
18. ^ "Journal of the London Mathematical Society". www1.maths.leeds.ac.uk. Retrieved 6
September  2022.
19. ^ Tarzi, Sam. (2014) Multicoloured Random Graphs: Constructions and Symmetry. London:
Sam Tarzi. p. xx. ISBN 9781505879957

External links[edit]
 J. K. Truss's profile on ResearchGate
 Personal website.
 John Truss lecturing on homogeneous lattices at the Banff International Research
Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery.

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Liz Truss

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 Living people
 20th-century English mathematicians
 Academics of the University of Leeds
 21st-century English mathematicians
 Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
 Simon Fraser University faculty
 Truss family
 Parents of prime ministers of the United Kingdom
 Academics of the University of the West of Scotland
 Alumni of the University of Leeds
 1947 births
 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activists
 This page was last edited on 2 March 2023, at 19:03 (UTC).
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