AL (Larry) Blakers (1917-1995) was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia for 30 years and head of the mathematics department for 29. He played key roles in founding the Mathematics Association of Western Australia and the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, and was a foundation member of the Australian Mathematical Society Council (Vice President 1961-63, 1976-78, and President 1980-82). He was also founder and long term Director of the National Mathematics Summer School for gifted high school students which takes place in Canberra each year.

Educated at Perth Modern School, Larry Blakers became the first mathematics honours student at UWA, graduating with first class honours. The outbreak of war, however, prevented his further study in Cambridge UK. In 1940, with assistance from UWA foundation mathematics Professor Charles Weatherburn, Larry went to Princeton where he was awarded an MA in 1942. He then served in the Royal Canadian Air Force as a flying officer and with the National Research Council of Canada until 1945. He returned to Princeton after the WWII and was awarded his PhD there in 1948. In 1952 Blakers was offered, and accepted, the chair of mathematics at UWA following Weatherburn’s retirement.

Larry was aware of the lack of any formal infrastructure linking the mathematics profession in Australia. In 1953 he drove overland from Perth and established personal contacts with the other Heads of Mathematics Departments in the east. He obtained agreement to establish a mathematical society (formally founded in 1956) and publish a mathematical journal (established in 1959).

After his death in 1995, thanks to the support of the then Head of School, Professor Cheryl Praeger, a fundraising appeal was launched. Alumni of the Maths department rallied magnificently, enabling an endowment to be established for the Blakers Prize for the best first year student in Maths and for a portrait of Larry Blakers to be commissioned. The portrait by Dr Drewfus Gates, who studied and later taught Physics at UWA, hangs in the Blakers Lecture Theatre.