My brother, Christopher Hoskin, who has died suddenly and unexpectedly aged 49, was both a talented mathematician and programmer as well as a keen naturalist, contributing significantly to the protection of the natural environment in Oxfordshire.
Born in Plymouth, Devon, to Colin, a shipyard supervisor and latterly civil servant, and Rosalind (nee Wakeham), a shop worker, Christopher grew up in Bearsden, Glasgow, and later in Somerset, where he progressed through the state school system, latterly at Frome community college, before accepting a place at Oxford, becoming the first member of his family to attend university.
At Mansfield College, he completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, and was awarded a DPhil in 2004. Despite leaving academia at this point, he continued to participate in mathematical research, contributing to the publication of four research papers on Jordan algebras between 2003 and 2011.
His other important contribution at Oxford lay in computing. He was the IT officer at Mansfield while still a student, before working in similar roles for Jesus College and the history faculty. In 2009 he became the IT manager of St Antony’s College, where he helped create the first shared server infrastructure between Lady Margaret Hall, St Hugh’s College and St Antony’s.
In 2015 Christopher moved into central IT services before leaving Oxford University in 2018 to work as a senior DevOps engineer for Overleaf, contributing to the development of a cloud-based editor for writing and publishing scientific manuscripts.
Christopher was a keen proponent of open source coding, becoming a Debian developer in 2016, and contributing more than 60 packages in a variety of coding language. He also regularly contributed to Mathlib, an open source library of formalised mathematical tools.
Outside work, Christopher dedicated his time to the study and protection of native plants and insects, becoming a stalwart of natural history organisations in Oxfordshire. He was chair of the Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire between 2008-11 and 2014-17, organised the society’s publicity and also, until recently, their speaker programme. Aside from holding committee positions, he gave talks on plant identification, participated in field surveys such as the Fungus Survey of Oxfordshire and volunteered at nature reserves.
He used his knowledge of plant taxonomy to identify and record instances of rare plants, most notably discovering a wild lizard orchid and later becoming Oxfordshire’s “flora guardian” for the plant. He was also successful at the painstaking task of propagating orchids at home, with the distribution of the resultant seedlings supporting the preservation of these endangered plants. He was an accomplished photographer, and his wildlife photographs often appeared in local newspapers and natural history publications.
Among his friends, Christopher was known as kind, thoughtful and modest, despite his myriad accomplishments.
He is survived by me, his sister, Ruth, and our parents.
