DR VICTOR OMOLOLU OLUNLOYO: A LEGACY OF UNCOMMON BRILLIANCE

On at least two separate occasions, social media was abuzz with false rumours of his death. I joked that, like Alfred Nobel, he’d had the strange privilege of reading his own obituary. In one such case, his family refuted the claim, explaining that he was actually in intensive care at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan. The following morning—Saturday—I made my way to the ICU. I had no intention of disrupting medical procedures; I just felt the need to be close by in case he required anything.

As expected and rightly so, the nurses did not allow visitors in. I scribbled my name on a piece of paper and asked a nurse to pass it to him—just so he’d know I was outside if he needed me. Not long after, the nurse returned in a rush, saying he wanted to see me immediately.

When I reached his bedside, he grasped my hand firmly and, to the surprise of the nearby staff, began quoting the somber words of Jacques from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…” I gently cut him off and told him there was no need to continue. Smiling, we both said in unison: the exit was not now.

He lived on for another three years, though his health steadily declined. And then, as it must come to all, death—though not unexpected—arrived on April 6, 2025. After a long life of eighty-nine years, during which he played many roles, his final curtain fell.

The preparation for these many parts began from Government College, Ibadan (GCI) in 1948, although he was scion to an illustrious family, the first educated elite and early Christians in Ibadan. When David and Anna Hinderer, the first CMS missionaries, came to Ibadan in 1853, they were placed in the care of Balogun Olunloyo, a warlord and high chief of Ibadan. Balogun Olunloyo’s children, Akinyele, male, and Yejide, female, found play and school with the Hinderers. Akinyele became the first male literate of Ibadan, while Yejide became the first female literate. Yejide Girls Grammar School, Ibadan, is named after her. The Olunloyos prominently took up early church, civil, and administrative roles in Ibadan. The Akinyele line produced Horatio Vincent Olunloyo, who was Victor Omololu’s father.

The brilliant signs of Horatio’s first son, Victor Omololu Olunloyo, were there even precociously from primary school. He took the common entrance examination, which was a global examination for all leaving primary school students, and he was first in 1946 and 1947 in the whole of the Ibadan District Church Council schools from Ibadan to Gbongan, Ikirun, and Osogbo. It was while at St. Peter’s Aremo Primary School that he was introduced to mathematics by an impressionable teacher, J.A.F Sokoya, in a remarkable and inspiring way. He saw early and clearly the relations of integers and that there was a concrete connection between mathematics and real life. Here, foundational mathematics was planted to flourish in him for the rest of his life.

In 1948, he entered Government College, Ibadan (GCI) from Standard Five, as the youngest in his class, when most of his classmates came in from Standard Six. It took him some time to rally. Once he found his stride in the second year, he never let go of the first position in Mathematics. To be first meant not just to score high but to get everything. Two illustrations will suffice.

A mathematics examination was going to be served by the teacher, Mr W.H. Browne. The teacher aimed to write the questions on the board, exit to have tea in the staff room, and come back to collect the students’ scripts. As he wrote the first question, he asked the students to commence. There were five questions, and they were to answer all of them. As he finished writing the fifth question and just as he was gathering his papers to go for tea, Olunloyo raised his hand. ‘What is it Olunloyo?’ the teacher queried. ‘I have finished, sir,’ Olunloyo replied. The teacher first thought it was a prank, remonstrated Olunloyo and then collected his papers for marking to see that, indeed, he had finished and got everything.

There was an ‘unsolvable’ problem in the Mathematics textbook by C.V. Durrell. It was common in those days to tackle all the problems in a text to gain proficiency in the subject. There was a generational problem because nobody in the annals of GCI that used Durell’s textbook had solved it. It was a problem built around a billiard table. It was such a knotty problem because it fell outside the imagination of the boys. They had never seen a billiard table before. And then Mr. A. Long, the principal, was going to be visiting a friend at the University College, Ibadan, and he took some boys along. One of them was Olunloyo. Following the visit, they called at the Senior Staff Dining Hall and Recreation Centre, and before their very eyes, for the first time ever, was a billiard table, and a game was on. Olunloyo took a careful look and was in a conjectural mood. He could hardly wait to return to school to tackle the intractable Durrell problem—the one that had baffled his class and the seniors before him. He settled to the problem and finally solved it. In that eureka moment, he threw off his uniform; some said he went nude, running wildly around his house, Grier, shouting: “I have solved it! I have solved it!! I have solved it!!!” It was a momentous occasion for schoolboy mathematics. His brilliance and escapades at GCI became a lore. He went on to record a Grade 1 in his final year at GCI and A1 in Mathematics.

After leaving GCI, he quickly stood out with remarkable academic achievements. In just seven months, he prepared for and passed his Higher School Certificate (HSC) exams—a course typically completed in two years—earning grades of AAAC. He then spent a brief three months at University College, Ibadan (UCI), during which he successfully completed the Intermediate BSc program, another two-year course, further cementing his reputation for academic brilliance.

Although his time at UCI was short, it left a lasting impression. In tests where students were asked to solve three out of five mathematical problems, Olunloyo would solve four within the time limit, instructing lecturers to “mark any three.” He always got them right, earning him the nickname “Mark Any Three” from his classmates.

His intellect caught the attention of many. Notable figures such as Adegoke Adelabu and Emmanuel Alayande regarded him as a rising star from Ibadan—a symbol of pride. Others, like M.S. Sowole (Ambassador and Agent-General for Western Nigeria in the UK), Lady Kofo Ademola, and her circle, recognized his talent as exceptional on a national scale and supported the idea of sending him abroad for university education.

While Olunloyo had his sights set on Manchester University—renowned at the time for its engineering and technology programs, and where his peer Ademola Banjo had just earned a first class in Mechanical Engineering—Lady Kofo Ademola had other plans. She wanted him to attend Cambridge, an institution known for producing mathematical giants like Isaac Newton, Alan Turing, and Carl Gauss, and also the alma mater of her husband, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola.

However, Cambridge offered only deferred admission since the academic session had already begun. Unwilling to wait a whole year, Olunloyo pushed for immediate admission elsewhere. At Kofo Ademola’s insistence, the search led to the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

St Andrews is no minor institution—it is Scotland’s oldest and most prestigious university, founded in 1413 and favored by British royalty. Although Olunloyo had only spent three months at UCI, St Andrews admitted him into its Mechanical Engineering program—but in the first year. Dissatisfied, Olunloyo insisted on entering the second year. While such requests were typically denied, he took his case to the Head of Department, Professor Caldericks, who then escalated it to the university Senate.

The Senate reluctantly agreed, but under one condition: he must first pass tests in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. Olunloyo asked for one week to prepare. When the exams were administered—three hours per subject—he scored 98% in Mathematics, 88% in Physics, and 84% in Chemistry. With those results, St Andrews granted his request and placed him in the second year.

In that second-year class, he led in all the subjects he took. He became a unique academic specimen, and this time, it was the Senate pressing to meet him. Prof Caldericks took his student to the Senate to the amazement of all the dons. Olunloyo got their bow. One of the amazing things he did in an examination of 150 questions in which they were expected to do 100 was to do all and he scored 132%. The next student to him scored 89%, while the third scored 66%. At graduation in 1957, six academic medals were available in his department; Olunloyo won five, and the sixth was won by Ifedayo Oladapo, both Nigerians, both old boys of Government College, Ibadan, and both classmates at GCI. Olunloyo recorded, of course, a first class in Mechanical Engineering. So did Ifedayo Oladapo, who went on to do his PhD at Cambridge.

At the end of the graduation year, the best results from the top ten universities in the UK, the Ivy League institutions, are pooled, and the very best of them get the most prestigious prize, the 1939 Prize, and also to dine with the monarch. It was Olunloyo who won the British Association Prize for the Most Distinguished Student in the Faculties of Science, and so dined with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 1958.

Olunloyo was exempted from a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mathematics and instead went straight on to do a PhD, a four to seven-year program. He did it in a record time of two years with outstanding merit, finishing in 1959. He was twenty-four. Let us not debate: he was one of Nigeria’s most brilliant men. His brilliance was proudly extolled both overseas and in Nigeria.

He returned to Nigeria, and marriage soon followed. I point this out just to relate it to brilliance. For his honeymoon, he and his first wife, Funmilayo, flew to the UK. On their return from Liverpool, they hitched a ride back on the Prime Minister’s yacht that had gone over for repairs. It was going to be a new adventure returning home by sea.

Early one morning in the middle of the journey, Olunloyo looked to the sun and to his shadow on the deck and used both to plot a mental compass enough to determine that the ship was headed in the wrong direction. He asked for the captain to come to the deck. He shared his mental calculations, and the captain laughed. A disdainful laugh followed, and then silence fell, followed by a reflective sigh. At the captain’s command in his cabin were dials pointing directions, knots showing speed, scopes indicating the depth of water and coordinates, and here was Olunloyo without a tool other than a phenomenal brain telling him he was taking the ship in the wrong direction. Olunloyo asked that he should go back to check his controls. The captain went back to his control and checked his dials and his consoles and when he returned this time, there were sweat beads on his eyebrows. He found that the ship was headed in the wrong direction on the mighty sea. The captain, speechless, motioned that Olunloyo should go back to his cabin. He was going to do a right about turn with the ship, the kind, if you are familiar with the sea, that brings about instant sea sickness. Well, better be sick than dead. Olunloyo, armed only with his brain and the rays of the sun, saved the ship, the crew, and the passengers from imminent disaster.

On a flight home from London on one occasion, Olunloyo ran into Prof. Wole Soyinka on the plane as he was putting his carrier bag in the overhead compartment. ‘Hello, editor of Mustard Seed.’ Wole Soyinka instantly turned and smiled. Soyinka was editor of Grier House magazine, Mustard Seed, in their school days at GCI and was two years Olunloyo’s senior. Both Soyinka and Olunloyo were in Grier House, both now academics, both sideline activists and politicians, both Ibadan ruminants who knew its nook and crannies for all its notable culinary joints. So there was plenty to share and to heartily reminisce about before they took their seats on the plane. Watching quizzically as they engaged were too students from the Middle East. Nervously, they went to Olunloyo. ‘Sir, is that Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate that you were talking to?’ Olunloyo answered in the affirmative, and both students nodded to themselves as if I told you so. Soyinka, with his mane, is unmistakable. The students summoned courage and approached Soyinka to pay their respects and admiration. They were mathematics students, so they asked Soyinka if Nigeria also had mathematicians of his stature. All Soyinka did was look back from his seat and point them to Olunloyo, who led them to him. The students returned to Olunloyo and laid bare their mathematics problem. They wanted a simultaneous equation problem involving three unknowns solved. Olunloyo asked for a sheet of paper and solved the problem with three approaches —substitution, matrices and moulds — to arrive at the same answer. It left the students with their mouths hanging open. Suddenly, they exclaimed: ‘Nigeria is full of geniuses.’ Perhaps so; who knows?

When Lekan Are, his friend and classmate was going to be 80, I teased him that Lekan’s GCI school number was 514 ahead of his at 546, making Lekan a quasi-senior boy. His mind went in a different direction. He said to me, ‘Lekan’s number at 514 is very interesting. That is, two to power nine (512) plus two to power one (2), making 514, which in binary language is 1,000,000,010 for the computer’. Anyone who thinks like that must be crazy. Olunloyo was crazy about mathematics.

I once had a week-long programme in Oxford. Somehow I finished by Friday and now had the weekend to myself. To occupy the weekend, I needed a handy book to engage me and so I went to Blackwell’s bookshop for one. I found none until I ran into a mathematics book. So captivated was I that I read the book to the bookshop’s till, through the bus ride to my hotel, and by the next day, I had finished reading the book. Excitedly, I called my wife with elan about my read, and she asked, as women are wont to do, whether I was under the influence. She declined to share the book with me and instead suggested that I give the book to Olunloyo.

As soon as I returned to Nigeria, I went to Olunloyo with my new find. Unsurprisingly, he sat me down and gave me a fuller lecture on Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian mathematician who took a mathematics chair at Cambridge without a university degree. Olunloyo just simply knew mathematics. When integers stood alone or together, he saw ascension or descension; he could make their evenness or oddities; when placed on top of one another and fractionated, he could make sense of them all; when a full stop was thrown around numbers, the decimals were his companions; seeing figures, he could make an apparent or inherent meaning to them; he could see figures when sequenced or looped; even when numbers were chaotic, he could make sense out of chaos. Given any figure, he saw a deeper meaning, and with several figures, he could interpret where, under the same circumstances, the rest of us drew a blank. So, for him, there was maths and beauty everywhere around us, in literature, in music, and horticulture. Three years ago, he introduced me to the maths in graphic arts through the works of the genius E.C. Escher. Olunloyo was just simply phenomenal, a wondrous make, a mathematical head, pure and simple. But he was humble enough to acknowledge the vastness of knowledge, and he made a daily assignment to learn continuously. And so he spent endless hours in his study and paid weekly visits to the bookshop. Even when he suffered a stroke, he put his head to the test, and when the faculty was still fully operational, he said the legs could go as long as the head was intact. He rode around in a wheelchair in his study and made regular visits to the bookshop. On his penultimate visit, he sent me a note … He wrote that the bill be given to ‘Kolade whatever his surname’, and this was coming from ‘Olunloyo the man with constitutional authority’.

At public events, he would occasionally drift into deep thought, seemingly lost in a world of numbers. Without warning, he might lean over a sheet of paper and begin working out complex mathematical problems, oblivious to his surroundings. I learned not to interrupt him in these moments—it was as though he’d crossed into another dimension. To others who stopped by to greet him—friends, admirers, relatives—he often appeared distracted or distant. Yet, somehow, he still managed to absorb everything happening around him. By the end of the function, he could recount the proceedings in astonishing detail, as though he had been fully present all along.

Professionally, he led a richly varied career in academia and public service. He began as a lecturer at the University of Ibadan, later moving to the University of Ife. He also served as Rector at The Polytechnic, Ibadan, and briefly at Kwara Polytechnic. Over a span of 45 years, he held no fewer than 55 roles across academic institutions and government bodies. He was Commissioner for Economic Planning and Community Development, as well as Commissioner for Education in the old Western State. At one point, he simultaneously held the portfolios for Education and for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs. In many of these roles, regardless of his official title, he was the go-to problem-solver—the troubleshooter, the mediator, the fixer brought in to handle complex challenges. It was this reputation that eventually drew him into politics, where he briefly served as Governor of Oyo State.

I was never particularly fond of his political career—and I made that known to him. He was a paradox, full of contradictions. Once, he described the political landscape of Oyo State as a tripod: Lamidi Adedibu brought the muscle, Azeez Arisekola and Yekini Adeojo the money, and Olunloyo himself—the brains—supplied the ideology and strategy. I was unimpressed. To me, it seemed he had aligned with men who pursued power by any means necessary. When I challenged him, he offered a wry defense: “Political parties are made up of angels and devils, just in unequal measure.” With time, I found truth in that.

Still, I listened to his political musings with polite restraint. In my heart, I felt he had veered off course. He had started his journey in mathematics with rare brilliance, only to stall when he entered the realm of politics. I wished he had remained devoted to his first love—mathematics and engineering—where his exceptional intellect might have left a far more enduring global legacy. Instead, he diverted into politics, where he remained unpredictable and restless, forever trying to apply the logic of equations to the chaos of human ambition. It was a challenge he could never quite resolve, and one that stayed with him until the very end.

Despite his extraordinary intellect, he struggled with financial management. This shortcoming became especially apparent in his later years, when the mounting cost of his medical care placed a heavy burden on him. The expenses extended beyond him—his family’s healthcare needs were also significant over the years. Individuals like him—deeply immersed in scholarship—should have been supported indefinitely by the government or academia, free from the distraction of financial worries. Their sole occupation should have been the pursuit of knowledge, day and night. Throughout his academic journey, he had benefitted from scholarships. He could easily have been designated a lifelong national scholar.

I believe Olunloyo wouldn’t mind my mentioning those to whom he owed a debt of gratitude—his family and a long list of benefactors: the late Abiola Ajimobi, the late Lekan Are, the late Alaafin Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, Enoch Adeboye, Rasheed Ladoja, Seyi Makinde, Bode George, Wale Babalakin, William Kumuyi, Olusegun Obasanjo, Gabriel Ogunmola, Kola Daisi, Lekan Ademosu, and Ibrahim Babangida. True friends rarely publicize the help they offer, but he often voiced his appreciation for their support.

Reflecting on all I’ve shared, one might ask where his true genius lay—in the world of scholarship, particularly mathematics and engineering, or in the political arena. My answer is clear: I side with scholarship.

He knew I wasn’t one to speak or write much, but when I did, it was always from the heart. That honesty formed the bedrock of our relationship. I was one of his confidants, someone he often bounced ideas off. He was not just a friend and mentor but also a constant stream of stimulating conversation—moving seamlessly from Beethoven to Newton, Einstein to Awolowo and Akintola, and always circling back to his beloved mathematicians: Euler, Ramanujan, Hawking, and Archimedes. He was a polymath, a polyglot, a wandering teacher, a nonconformist, and a restless political spirit. He could shift from Pythagoras to Aristotle, from Dante to Nietzsche and Shakespeare, with remarkable ease. His intellectual depth was truly exceptional.

I recall a story he once shared: Chief Obafemi Awolowo had written him a letter stating, “…when I become 80…” Upon reading it, Olunloyo returned the letter the next day, inserting two words to temper the certainty: “…if and when I become 80…” Awolowo accepted the edit. As it happened, he passed away at 79. Olunloyo often pointed out that language must make room for divine will—for whatever will be, only if God allows it: deo volente.

On Saturday, April 5, 2025, Dr. Olunloyo called me not once, but four times. On the fourth call, he gave me an assignment. When I reached out to the mutual friend involved, I casually added, “By the way, Dr. Victor Olunloyo will be 90 on April 14, 2025.” But then I paused, recalling his story, and quickly revised it to read: “…will be 90 on April 14, 2025, God willing.”

The very next day, on April 6, 2025, God in His providence called him home.

Even though I had braced myself through past false alarms and long hospital stays, when the end finally came, I couldn’t help but shed a tear.