Alfred W. Hales

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Alfred Washington Hales (born November 30, 1938 in Pasadena , California ) is an American mathematician who studied combinatorics and algebra .

Hales studied at Caltech and was there twice as a student in 1958/59 Putnam Fellow . In 1960 he received his bachelor's degree and in 1962 he received his PhD with Robert Dilworth at Caltech ( On the nonexistence of free complete Boolean algebras ). As a post-doctoral student , he was at the University of Cambridge in 1962/63 . From 1963 to 1966 he was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University . From 1966 he was first assistant professor and then professor at the University of California, Los Angeles , where he temporarily headed the faculty. In 1992 he became Professor Emeritus and headed the Center for Communications and Computing of the Institute for Defense Analyzes .

In 1977/78 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Warwick , 1986/97 at MSRI , whose Board of Trustees he was a member from 1995 to 1999, and 1970/71 at the University of Washington .

He is known for the Hales-Jewett (1963, with Robert I. Jewett ) theorem from the Ramsey theory . The theorem ensures the existence of regular structures with sufficiently high dimensions and was considered and proven by them for the example of a generalized game of the tic-tac-toe type. If you play the game on a sufficiently high-dimensional cube with a given side length n and number of players c, there is always a winning solution (row, column or diagonal of the same color).

He contributed to the book Shift Register Sequences by Solomon W. Golomb . He also dealt with group theory and theory of modules and associations.

In 1971 he was one of the first recipients of the George Pólya Prize, along with Jewett and others . He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

He has been married to Virginia Green since 1962 and has one son and two daughters.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Hales, Jewett Regularity and positional games , Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 1963, 106: 222-229
personal data
SURNAME Hales, Alfred W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hales, Alfred Washington (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Pasadena , California