David E. H. Jones

David Edward Hugh Jones was born in Southwark, London, England on April 20, 1938. He received a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in organic chemistry from Imperial College in London. He worked as a spectroscopist for Imperial Chemical Industries and became a research fellow and professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He wrote hundreds of columns about Daedalus, an imaginary inventor, for the journals New Scientist and Nature. He also wrote books of fiction about the character. Some of his books included The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes, The Further Inventions of Daedalus, The Aha! Moment: A Scientist's Take on Creativity, and Why Are We Conscious? In 2001, he received an Ig Nobel Prize by the Annals of Improbable Research for his columns. He died from complications of prostate cancer on July 19, 2017 at the age of 79.