Renowned Mathematician, Professor Francis Kofi Ampenyin Allotey, 85, is reported to have passed away Thursday night after complaining of discomfort.
A family member, Sarah Ofei, told Peace FM, the professor passed at about 10 pm after he was rushed to the hospital. “Around 10 am Thursday morning he complained he did not feel well so we sent him to the hospital,” she said.
The Nuclear Physicist was discharged the same day, but the family rushed him back to the hospital after the discomfort resurfaced in the evening.
“In less than 30 minutes after arriving at the hospital, he passed on”, she said.
Mrs Offei said Ghana’s first professor of mathematics was not sick and was preparing for a UNESCO conference on Saturday where he was to be honoured.
Biography of Prof Allotey
Prof Francis Kofi Allotey was born at Saltpond in the Central Region of Ghana in 1932. He is known for the “Allotey Formalism” which arose from his work on soft X-rayspectroscopy.
As a founding fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, in 1974, he became the first Ghanaian full professor of mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
Prof Allotey was the President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS) and a member of a number of international scientific organisations including the International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics (ICTP).
He was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Accra Institute of Technology (AIT), the President of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Ghana (AIMS-Ghana).
He was also a holder of master’s and doctorate degrees from Princeton University and the diploma of Imperial College (1960). He was also an honorary fellow of the IOP Institute of Physics.
The Professor Francis Allotey Graduate School was established in 2009 at the Accra Institute of Technology in his honour.
