George W. Whitehead
George William Whitehead (born August 2, 1918 in Bloomington , Illinois , † April 12, 2004 ) was an American mathematician who dealt with topology .
George Whitehead studied at the University of Chicago , where he received his doctorate in 1941 under Norman Steenrod ( Homotopy properties of the real orthogonal groups ). He then was an instructor at Purdue University and Princeton University and an assistant professor at Brown University before becoming a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 . There he received a full professorship in 1957 and retired in 1985.
Whitehead was one of the pioneers of algebraic topology and homotopy theory . In the 1950s he applied spectral sequences early on to study the homotopy groups of spheres (independently of Jean-Pierre Serre and Henri Cartan in France). In 1942 he introduced the J-homormorphism from homotopy groups of the special orthogonal groups to the homotopy groups of spheres as an extension of a construction by Heinz Hopf . His 1962 article Generalized Homology Theories was particularly influential .
In 1972 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1954 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was a Guggenheim Fellow and 1955/56 Fulbright Research Scholar. In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Some aspects of stable homotopy theory ).
His PhD students include Robert Aumann and John Coleman Moore .
It should not be confused with John Henry Constantine Whitehead , after whom the Whitehead lemma , which leads to the definition of the K 1 group , and the Whitehead theorem , which characterizes the homotopy equivalence between CW complexes , are named.
Fonts
- Recent advances in homotopy theory , American Mathematical Society 1970
- Elements of homotopy theory , Springer Verlag, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 1978
- Homotopy Theory , MIT Press 1966
- Homotopy groups of spheres. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Cambridge, Mass., 1950, vol. 2, pp. 358-362. Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1952.
- A generalization of the Hopf invariant. Ann. of Math. (2) 51: 192-237 (1950).
- Generalized homology theories. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 102: 227-283 (1962).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ George W. Whitehead in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
- ^ Whitehead On the homotopy groups of spheres and rotation groups , Annals of Mathematics, 2nd Series, Volume 43, 1942, pp. 634-640
- ↑ Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., Vol. 10, 1962, pp. 227-282
personal data | |
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SURNAME | Whitehead, George W. |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Whitehead, George William (full name) |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
DATE OF BIRTH | August 2, 1918 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Bloomington , Illinois |
DATE OF DEATH | April 12, 2004 |