Today is my official last day, after 50 years, as a University lecturer, made up of

• half a year at the University of Michigan;
• a year and a bit at Bedford College, London;
• eleven years at Merton College, Oxford;
• 26 years at what began as Queen Mary College, University of London, and ended up dropping the “College” and the comma;
• 12 years at the University of St Andrews;
• and in the middle of this, some remote teaching at Universidade Aberta in Portugal.

During that time I have taught courses from multivariate calculus to operational research, from mathematical logic to algebraic structures.

I suppose the course of which I am most proud is Mathematical Structures for all first-semester students on mathematics or joint degrees at Queen Mary; you can watch my LMS/Gresham College lecture about it here.

And, of course, it is not over yet; I will be teaching classes and marking exam scripts on Set Theory and Mathematical Logic for the rest of this semester.

I hope that research will carry on as usual, that the occasional bit of teaching will come my way (I very much enjoy dealing with students), and that I can avoid the less enjoyable bits of admin.

I should become Professor Emeritus tomorrow. There was some difficulty between Human Resources and the academic side of the University, which may not be fully resolved yet; I will only discover this when I can see whether my access card still works, whether I can still read email, and so on. They had threatened to remove all these things tomorrow, and I am not sure yet that they really understand, since they describe my status from tomorrow as a “new contract” and my last pay slip includes “redundancy pay”. Ah well, we shall see.