Charles John Read (16 February 1958 – 14 August 2015) was a British mathematician known for his work in functional analysis. In operator theory, he is best known for his work in the 1980s on the invariant subspace problem, where he constructed operators with only trivial invariant subspaces on particular Banach spaces, especially on . He won the 1985 Junior Berwick Prize for his work on the invariant subspace problem. Read has also published on Banach algebras and hypercyclicity; in particular, he constructed the first example of an amenable, commutative, radical Banach algebra. Education and career Read won a scholarship to study mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1975, and was awarded a first-class degree in Mathematics in 1978. He completed his PhD thesis entitled Some Problems in the Geometry of Banach Spaces at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Béla Bollobás. He spent the year 1981–82 at Louisiana State University.At the time of his death, he was a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds after having been a fellow of Trinity for several years. Personal life Christianity On his personal website, formerly at the University of Leeds, Read described himself first and foremost as a Born-Again Christian. Some biographical details may be found in what he described as his Christian Testimony on that site describing his conversion process. He described losing his father to cancer in 1970 when he was 11 years old, and that this loss prompted him to ask questions about whether, and in what form, we might continue to live after we die - and that consciousness may be independent of the body. He came to the conclusion that the conscious mind must survive after death. This also led him to believe that since we are "immortal beings" that we must always try to "do the right thing". Some time later the article described an incident where he had pushed a smaller boy out of the way in a queue at a sweet shop. He later interpreted his later sense of remorse at having done something wrong as the "Classical Christian conviction of sin", and claimed to have had a religious experience on a London Underground train where he felt a sense of joy at being forgiven, and simultaneously bursting into tears. Read also claimed to have taken part in a miracle of Christian healing at a Christian meeting run