Colin Pask

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Colin Pask (born 1943) is a British mathematical physicist and science writer. He was born in Great Gonerby, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where his father ran a dairy farm. He went to King’s School, Grantham, then studied theoretical physics and mathematics at Queen Mary College, London, earning a B.Sc. in 1964.

Pask did his PhD in nuclear physics at the University of New South Wales under John M. Blatt, finishing in 1967 with a dissertation on the nuclear three‑body problem. After a period at Duke University, he returned to UNSW as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics. In 1971 he moved to the Australian National University on an Australian Research Council fellowship, where he became a Fellow in 1973 and a Senior Fellow in 1978.

In 1986 he became head of University College at UNSW Canberra at ADFA and stayed in that role for 12 years. He is now Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Sciences and History at UNSW.

As a post‑doctoral researcher, Pask worked on optical physics and biological vision. In 1973 he published with Allan Snyder an optical waveguide explanation of the Stiles–Crawford effect. Pask and McIntyre reviewed related theory and experiments in 2013. His collaboration with Kevin Barrell from around 1980 contributed to the theory of the apposition eye. In the 1970s he published on attenuation effects in optical fibres, collaborating with Adrian Ankiewicz. He has also written several popular science works.