Ronald Brown was born in 1935. He did undergraduate and postgraduatework at Oxford, where he was a student of J.H.C. Whitehead, fromwhom he acquired many attitudes to mathematics. His first positionas lecturer was at Liverpool University, 1959-64; then HullUniversity as Senior Lecturer and Reader, 1964-1970; then Professorat Bangor University, as it is now named.The first edition of `Topology and Groupoids' was published in 1968as `Elements of Modern Topology' by McGraw Hill. Writing this bookset a research line continuing till now, namely the investigation inmathematics of groupoids as a generalisation of groups, allowing amore flexible approach to symmetry and also new structures in higherdimensions. More on this can be found on the author's web sitewww.bangor.ac.uk/r.brown , which also has lots of comments onteaching and popularisation.Ronald Brown has been very fortunate in his many collaborators, andalso in a collaboration with the sculptor John Robinson. Seewww.popmath.org.uk .