Francis Kofi Ampenyin Allotey (9 August 1932 – 2 November 2017) was a Ghanaian mathematical physicist. Together with Daniel Afedzi Akyeampong, he became the first Ghanaian to obtain a doctorate in mathematical sciences, earned in 1966. Early life and education Allotey was born on 9 August 1932 in the Fante town of Saltpond in the Central Region of Ghana to Joseph Kofi Allotey, a general commodities merchant and Alice Esi Nyena Allotey, a dressmaker from the Royal Dehyena family of Enyan Owomase and Ekumfi Edumafa, in the Central Region of Ghana. His father owned a bookstore. During his childhood, Allotey spent his free time in his father's bookstore reading the biographies of famous scientists which piqued his interest in science. He was raised a Roman Catholic. He had his primary education at St. John the Baptist Catholic (Boys) School in Saltpond and was among the pioneer batch of Ghana National College when the school was founded in July 1948 by Kwame Nkrumah. After secondary school, he attended the University Tutorial College in Ghana and the London Borough Polytechnic. He held master's and doctorate degrees from Princeton University, awarded in 1966 and earlier the Diploma of Imperial College, obtained in 1960. He was tutored by the Pakistani Nobel prize-winning physicist Abdus Salam as an undergraduate at Imperial College. During his time at Princeton, Allotey was mentored by many physicists such as Robert Dicke, Val Fitch, Robert Oppenheimer, Paul A. M. Dirac and C. N. Yang. Career He was known for the "Allotey Formalism" which arose from his work on soft X-ray spectroscopy. He was the 1973 recipient of the UK Prince Philip Golden Award for his work in this area. A founding fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, in 1974, he became the first Ghanaian full professor of mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics and later Dean of the Faculty of Science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. He was also the founding director of the KNUST Computer Centre before he assumed his position as the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the university. Among Allotey's colleagues on the mathematics faculty at KNUST was Atu Mensa Taylor (died in 1977), the third Ghanaian to obtain a doctorate in mathematics. Taylor had received his DPhil (1967) from Oxford under the Welsh mathematical physicist, John Trevor Lewis, having also received an MA there many years before. Allotey was the President of