John Greenlees Semple
John "Jack" Greenlees Semple (born June 10, 1904 in Belfast , † October 23, 1985 in London ) was a British mathematician who dealt with algebraic geometry .
Semple studied mathematics at Queen's University Belfast with a bachelor's degree in 1924 and at Cambridge University , where he took the Tripos exams with honors in 1927 . In 1930 he did his doctorate in Cambridge with Henry Frederick Baker (Surfaces of intersection of cubic primals. 2. Cubic Cremona transformations of 4-dimensional space) and became a Fellow of St. John's College in Cambridge. In 1929 he won the Rayleigh Prize and became a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and in 1930 professor at Queen's University Belfast. There he was also dean of the Faculty of Arts and in the university senate for three years. In 1936 he became a professor at King's College London . During World War II he organized the evacuation of the math faculty (headed by George Temple ) to Bristol, where it was until 1943. In 1953 he succeeded Temple as head of the mathematics department at King's College. With Leonard Roth , he led the London Geometry Seminar for over 40 years.
From 1944 to 1947 he was secretary of the London Mathematical Society and edited its Journal of the London Mathematical Society .
He wrote an introduction to algebraic geometry with Leonard Roth and two further monographs with GT Kneebone, in which, in his own words, he did not want to lose sight of the geometrical side in addition to the algebraic basis, because “nothing could be more undesirable than that This traditionally elegant area should be allowed to take on the appearance of a mere dressing room in which algebra is disguised with geometric phraseology. ” Semple did not approve of the increasingly abstract direction of algebraic geometry and after 1957 he published hardly any research on it for ten years. Instead, he turned to the university administration, was a member of the Senate and had connections to foreign colleges that were connected with the University of London (Rhodesia, the Caribbean, Hong Kong). In the late 1960s, he resumed his research and examined problems that he had dealt with decades earlier in a new light. In 1971 his book on Clifford parallels was published.
In 1932 he was elected to the Royal Irish Academy .
Fonts (selection)
- with Leonard Roth: Introduction to algebraic geometry, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1949, Oxford University Press 1985
- with GT Kneebone: Algebraic Projective Geometry, Oxford University Press 1952, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1979
- with GT Kneebone: Algebraic Curves, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1959
- with JA Tyrell: Generalized Clifford Parallelism, Cambridge UP 1971
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : John Greenlees Semple. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Greenlees Semple in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
- ↑ Semple, Kneebone, preface to Algebraic projective geometry 1952
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Semple, John Greenlees |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Semple, Jack (nickname) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 10, 1904 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Belfast |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 23, 1985 |
| Place of death | London |