Longest Married Alumni Couple?

On Valentine’s Day we posted a request on our Facebook page to try and work out which of our alumni couples had been married the longest and this is one of the stories.

Ann Langley and Gilbert Laporte met at Lancaster while they were doing an MA in Operational Research in 1971-1972. They got married in Bristol on August 3rd 1974.

Gilbert had graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics from McGill University, in Montreal, in 1971. He went on to do an MA in Operational Research at Lancaster, partly due to its reputation and partly because of the mystique side of England which he had discovered through the television series 'The Avengers'. After the MA he went to the LSE to do a PhD in Operational Research and graduated in 1975. Since 1976 he has been Assistant, Associate and full Professor at HEC Montreal.

Ann was born in the UK and did her first degree in Mathematics at Oxford and then on to Lancaster in the hope of learning something that might make her highly abstract mathematical training more useful. While Gilbert was doing his PhD they lived in London and she worked at Mars Ltd in Slough. When they moved to Montreal she learned French, worked in the health care sector, obtained her own PhD in Management and became a faculty member, first at the Université du Québec à Montréal and then at HEC Montréal where she is now. Members of her family still live in Bristol.

They have a daughter, Cathy, who did a PhD in Engineering and is now Assistant Professor in an Engineering school in Montreal (École de Technologie Supérieure).

Next year Ann and Gilbert will celebrate 40 years of marriage. Do you know of any alumni who can boast even more years? We'd be delighted to hear from you.