Brilliant mathematician with a special interest in magic squares, she served as an educational adviser to Thatcher in the 1980s
Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, who has died aged 101, was a noted mathematician and educationist. She also served as lord mayor of Manchester and was a local councillor in her native city for more than 25 years.
In mathematics, one of her particular interests was magic squares, a subject that had fascinated mathematicians for thousands of years. These are grids in which the numbers add up horizontally, vertically and diagonally to the same total. Kathleen's best known mathematical work, Most-Perfect Pandiagonal Magic Squares: Their Construction and Enumeration (1998), co-authored with David Brée, was the result of her investigations.
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