I am a biochemist (now retired) at the CNRS in Marseilles, formerly Birmingham (UK). I have an h-index of 66 (Google Scholar), and an Erdős number of 3, via Jorge Soto-Andrade and Winnie Li (a bit of a cheat, really, as I'm not a mathematician and barely understand the mathematics in the papers coauthored with Jorge Soto).
Main interests: Biochemistry, especially enzymes, metabolic regulation, self-organization, metabolic control analysis, definition of life, biochemical evolution; physical chemistry; history and philosophy of science; Chile, and Latin America in general.
On any page, on any topic, if I see a red link I try to find a way to make it blue.
In addition to these I've made a huge number of minor edits to pages about small places in Chile (and a few more substantial edits, for example for El Quisco). That has become an obsession, and a bit pointless, as I doubt whether any readers of Wikipedia in English really care who represents Sierra Gorda in the Senate. However, if the information is there it should be correct.
Photo in school uniform taken in about 1953. I may have changed a bit since then.
My real name is Athel Cornish-Bowden. Anyone who knows me in real life will have easily guessed that from the way I sign, but it's not so obvious for others. When I first registered for Wikipedia I signed like that, but when I realized that most people didn't I changed to what you see now. The A in my given name is pronounced like the a in "hat" [æ]; most people say it like that, but I've heard it with the a of "hate" [ɛɪ̯]. "Cornish" is pronounced as you'd expect. The "Bow" in "Bowden" can be pronounced like "bow" or like "bow", whichever you prefer. That sounds a bit obscure, so I rephrase: it can be pronounced like "beau" or like "bough", whichever you prefer: [bəʊ̯] or [baʊ̯]. The name is common in the southwest, Devon in particular, where it is pronounced ['baʊ̯dən] ("bough dən"). My great-grandfather William Bowden was from Devon and pronounced it accordingly. However, my great-grandmother thought that sounded "common" and insisted that he change it to ['bəʊ̯dən] ("beau dən"), and that's how most of us say it today. The name is also common in Greater Manchester (with nothing much in between, so it probably arose independently in two places), where it is pronounced ['bəʊ̯dən] or ['bo:dən].
I saw a section entitled "People with Wikipedia articles that I've met" on another user's page, and I thought, that's interesting, I wonder how many I have. I haven't included people who are still alive, but only people who can't come back and say they have no idea who I am. I also don't include people that I met very casually in circumstances where they wouldn't remember me afterwards, such as the Nobel Prizewinner whose car I helped to push when it broke down in Oxford, or another Nobel Prizewinner that I exchanged a few words with when we found ourselves next to one another at the urinals at a meeting at Harvard.
The composer Christopher Willis is my nephew. However, it doesn't say so either in his Wikipedia article or in mine, because I don't know of a source that would be acceptable as verification.
^ abcdefFrom EC Accepted Name to title of article (only done when it isn't obvious)
^This is to counteract a particularly silly inconsistency on another page
^The English spelling is used less and less, but people may still search for it.
^Previously Mikhail Volkenstein redirected to Mikhail Volkenshtein. Now it's the other way round, to conform to how he wrote his name himself in publications in English.
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