My Gift of Polio

Book excerpt: James Murray was the youngest of six children born into a poor working-class family in Moffat, a very small isolated town in rural Scotland, during the Depression of the early 1930s. He caught polio as a baby and his future looked bleak. This profusely illustrated memoir describes his early years growing up in poverty and follows his serendipitous life beyond - taking him from degrees at the University of St. Andrews to international renown in the world of academia at Harvard, Oxford, Paris and other universities around the world. Murray describes his involvement as an Advisory Director with the founding problems of the Arvon Foundation in Britain. Murray's groundbreaking scientific research was a new field of mathematics of genuine use in the real world, which he applied to brain tumours, divorce prediction and many other areas. Aspects of this research are described in a non-technical way alongside other descriptions of his many other diverse skills, enthusiasms, and friendships such as those with Leonard Baskin, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes including some unpublished poems.