Ian Stewart Crawford. Born 20th March: Died 20th August 2018.
Born in Eltham, Taranaki, New Zealand. Oldest of 3 born to Dan a doctor and Kathleen a nurse. Excellent sportsman and chess player. Won the Auckland chess championship. At 16 he left New Plymouth Boys High and worked for a travel company. When he was 21 he did a Bachelor of Science at Auckland University in Mathematics. He had his heart set on learning computers. He travelled to Sydney and approached IBM for a job but they required a PHD or an actuary. This would take another 5 years so Ian decided to leave Australia. Went to England in 1956 and joined LEO Computers and then joined PA Consulting as a computer consultant https://www.paconsulting.com/about-us/ before returning to NZ beginning of 1966 after getting married. He became an independent management consultant in NZ and had approximately 100 assignments in his 30 years before retiring in 1996. He set up the Long Range Planning Society in NZ but this organization does not appear to exist any longer. When he retired he began work on a computer program written in PROLOG on Natural Language Processing which he continued to work on until his health began to fail at the beginning of 2018. He is survived by his wife Virginia Crawford, his daughters Sue Crawford (Independent IT consultant), Kate Everett (Chemical Engineer) and Joanna Crawford (English teacher at Massey University). He had 7 grandchildren. His brother (a doctor and leprosy researcher) still resides in London.