The Life
Gorman was born in Kesh, County Fermanagh, on 17 June 1923. His father, a veterinary surgeon, died when Gorman was young, and so he was raised by his mother, spending part of his childhood in what was then Rhodesia.
He liked to recount that it was his African nanny who rejected William as a not very Irish name and rechristened him Terence, by which he was thereafter universally known. Back in Ireland, he attended Mount Temple College in Dublin and Foyle College in Derry before going up to Trinity College Dublin in 1941. He served as a Rating and then Petty Officer in the Royal Navy from 1943 to 1946, and then returned to Trinity where he graduated in Economics in 1948 and in Mathematics in 1949.[156] After Trinity, Gorman moved to Britain where he held a succession of posts at leading economics departments. From 1949 to 1962, he taught at the University of Birmingham, which was a leading centre for theoretical research in the 1950s, with Frank Hahn and Maurice McManus among his colleagues. In 1962, he was appointed to a chair in economics at Oxford and in 1967 he moved to a chair at the London School of Economics, where he played a central role in the development of a taught Master's programme in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics, then a rarity outside the United States. He returned to Oxford in 1979 as an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, becoming Senior Research Fellow in 1984 and Emeritus Fellow in 1990. He also spent periods as Visiting Professor at several US universities, including Iowa, Johns Hopkins, North Carolina and Stanford. Meanwhile, honours and awards were piling up, most notably the Presidency of the Econometric Society in 1972, as well as Fellowship of the British Academy, membership of Academia Europaea, honorary foreign membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Economic Association, and honorary doctorates from University College London and the Universities of Birmingham and Southampton. In Ireland too his achievements were recognised, with an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland in 1986 and an Honorary Fellowship fromTrinity College Dublin some years later. After retirement, he continued to live in Oxford, also spending summers in County Cork with his wife Dorinda, whom he had met at Trinity, until in his last years when illness impaired his mobility.
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