Professor Robert McNeill Alexander CBE FRS (1934-2016).

Robert McNeill Alexander, known to friends and colleagues as 'Neill', was a zoologist with an engineer's eye for how animals work. He used mathematical models to show how evolution has produced optimal designs. His skill was to choose appropriate models: realistic enough to contain the essence of a problem and yet simple enough to be tractable. He wrote fluently and easily: 23 books, 280 papers and a CD-ROM entitled How Animals Move.