Obituary

During this time he taught countless undergraduate and postgraduate students and supervised numerous PhD students, many of whom have gone on to hold senior academic and industrial posts.Gerry's undoubted strength was to be able to analyse what might appear to be a seemingly complex, almost intractable, mathematical problem and produce a simple, elegant solution or mathematical model, which he could describe in the simplest terms.Students and colleagues alike were simply in awe of his ability to produce new mathematics without ever making an errorno dropped "squared" or subscripts, no plusses where a minus was needed!He was an excellent teacher and communicator.As anyone who has ever tried to teach statistics will tell you, it is not easy to make it interesting and understandable, yet Gerry mastered both.Many a PhD, MPhil or MSc student, not only those that he supervised, but others he helped, owe the award of their degrees to the statistical analysis and mathematical models that he proposed to explain their research results.In addition to two publications on Practical Statistics for the Textile Industry, published by the Textile Institute, he published over 60 refereed papers (https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=G.A.V.Leaf&btnG=) and chapters in text books.Most of these have been in the field of theoretical mechanics and analysis of textile structures ( fibres, yarns, knitted, woven and nonwoven fabrics).However others have covered areas as diverse as needle forces on knitting cams, fibre trajectories during the airlaying nonwoven process, cone winding, prediction of fabric loss during spreading in clothing manufacture and the computer simulation of production systems for woven fabric manufacture.This is not to forget the countless research papers that he contributed to without seeking authorship or acknowledgement.He was that kind of man.He was once asked to look at a very weak paper from Korea that had been recommended for rejection.