PAUL COHN was a distinguished algebraist and the former Astor Professor of Mathematics at University College London.
An only child, he was born in Hamburg in 1924 to Jewish parents. At 15 he was sent to England on the Kindertransport, and never saw the rest of his family again. After four years’ manual labour, during which he taught himself Latin, he won an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1944. He obtained his BA in 1948 and his PhD, working with Philip Hall at Cambridge, in 1951. After a year as a chargé de recherches at the University of Nancy, he served as a lecturer in the University of Manchester (whose mathematics department rivalled that of Cambridge in the early postwar years) from 1952 to