By 'eck, hexagonal close-packed lattice is less stable than crystal face-centred lattice

T	HE secret, mind-expand ing side of the gritty citizens of Bradford made a rare foray into the limelight yesterday with a local professor's "remarkable, world-beating, but entirely pointless" mathematical triumph.

Bearing out J.B. Priestley's view that Bradfordians only pretend to be hard-headed ("You think they care for nothing but t'brass? Don't you believe it"), Prof Les Woodcock joyfully announced that the success of his 23-year project was "of no practical use whatever."

Beating scores of other physical chemists to the demonstration that hexagonal close-packed lattice is less stable than crystal face centred lattice (by a minus cule amount), he summarised the brain-crunching maths involved as "a long and tedious calculation."

But behind the miles of sums, Prof Woodcock, physi cal chemistry professor at the University of Bradford, ad mitted an academic version of the Grail Quest. "It isn't fashionable in UK universities to want to do something for purely academic reasons, just for curiosity," he said. "But this be came my personal hobby horse. "It was an obscure piece of ignorance in science, and I decided that I was going to be the one to solve it. If you ask someone who's tried to climb Everest, it is the same reason. It is a challenge."

Prof Woodcock, who is 51, a father of seven and a small holder grazing sheep and cows in the Yorkshire Dales. planted his flag on the sum's summit more than two decades after leaving the foot hills of Churchill College, Cambridge. He first became fascinated by the problem there, and walked two miles daily to punch computer cards into the university's central computer.

Diverted to Amsterdam and a professorial chair at the age of 33, he introduced the riddle to Dutch computers before settling in Bradford and harnessing 12 terminals to the apparently endless task. Then a local Bill Gates clone, German exchange student Hendrik Rush, 21, allied a fervour for computing to Prof Wood cock's mathematical nouse.

"He was a wizard - he worked out how to use the computer network's spark stations at the same time, giving me even more power," said the professor.

Prof Woodcock now plans to return to decent obscurity, and, he hopes, continued membership of his local pub's trivia quiz team. Although the triumph gave him great pleasure, he said, he was concerned the team might ban him if they discovered he was a professor, because he keeps giving the wrong answers.