registered for a University of London M.Sc. in the area of mathematical analysis. When he sat the papers, however, he failed to get the degree. ICI Billingham In 1950, Aris returned to ICI and began working for C. H. Bosanquet in Billingham, England. Working with Bosanquet provided Aris the opportunity to work on a large variety of problems, including catalysis, heat transfer, gas scrubbing, and centrifuge design. Aris was then promoted to Technical Officer, where he began working on chromatography. He utilized results from a paper on dispersion written by Geoffrey Taylor, and extended its results, ultimately writing a paper in 1955 that applied the method of moments to Taylor's approach. He submitted the paper to the Proceedings of the Royal Society, with help from Taylor (who was a Fellow of the Royal Society). Aris communicated with Taylor regarding dispersion and diffusion. In the meantime, however, he was transferred to a different division, where he began working on chemical reactor design. Frustrated with the transfer and with the proprietary nature of his commercial work, which made publishing work very difficult, he decided to move to a university, applying for several lectureship positions during 1954 and 1955 without success. Aris continued to work at ICI, focusing much of his efforts on mathematical modeling of adiabatic multi-bed reactors, a topic that was the central focus of an M.S. student at the University of Minnesota. In 1955, Neal Amundson of the University of Minnesota, who was on sabbatical at Cambridge, visited the ICI Research Department, where Aris was working. Amundson suggested to ICI, during his visit, that Aris be sent to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for a year of study. Several months later, Aris later met Amundson at Cambridge and told Amundson of his plans to leave ICI for academia, plans that he had not revealed to his superiors at ICI. Amundson offered Aris a research fellowship at the University of Minnesota, which Aris accepted. After notifying ICI of his intent to leave, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota at the end of 1955. Academic career University of Minnesota research fellowship Aris began working on chemically reacting laminar flow, applying Kummer's hypergeometric function to the problem, and control of a stirred tank reactor with some unusual properties. Both problems required the use of a computer to perform calculations, and Amundson provided Aris with a computer science graduate student with whom to work.