“For Tempest Anderson, pioneering new techniques of ophthalmic surgery and inventing photographic equipment was not enough. He decided that his ‘limited leisure’ time could not be filled with reading, writing or socialising, he sought to occupy himself with something more exciting: volcanology. For him, it was a branch of science that did not have too much literature and had the ‘advantage of offering exercise in the open air’: he saw the sides of volcanoes not as dangerous but ‘picturesque’”.

“He was vacationing in Finland when the war broke out, and he tried to lay low in Helsinki but was arrested and returned to France, where he sat in jail during the spring of 1940, awaiting trial for desertion. While there, he took some consolation from the fact that jail allowed him to work undisturbed, as well as to read novels and write letters, in particular letters to his sister, Simone Weil, who was also remarkably talented, a philosopher and spiritual thinker.

Though her brother’s incarceration infuriated her, Simone saw an opportunity. “

“He was a brilliant mathematician," Ms Pitt says. "He did those 30,000 hand-rendered mathematical equations in six months, which is a very short period of time - and that's all he did. He would eat, breathe and sleep the Sydney Opera House."