Marshall Hall (mathematician)

Marshall Hall junior (born September 17, 1910 in St. Louis , † July 4, 1990 in London ) was an American mathematician who dealt with group theory and combinatorics.

Marshall Hall (right) with Ernst Witt

M. Hall

Life

Hall studied at Yale University (Bachelor 1932) and from 1932 at Cambridge University in England, where he met Godfrey Harold Hardy , Philip Hall and Harold Davenport , among others . In 1933 he was back at Yale, where he received his doctorate from Øystein Ore in 1936 with An Isomorphism between linear recurring sequences and algebraic rings . After a detour to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1936/37 , he was an instructor at Yale. During World War II, he worked on deciphering work for the US Navy Intelligence Service (on both Japanese codes and the German Enigma ). Then he was back at Yale, went to Ohio State University in 1946 , where he became a professor in 1948, and to Caltech in 1959 , where he retired in 1981. From 1985 until his death in 1990 he was visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta . He was also visiting professor at Oxford University , the Technion in Haifa and the University of California, Santa Barbara .

Hall wrote a widely used textbook on group theory. He solved the Burnside problem for the exponent 6 and published an important paper on finite projective planes in 1943 ( Projective Planes . Transactions American Mathematical Society, Vol. 54, 1943, pp. 229-277). In combinatorics, he continued to work with block designs, among other things.

Hall was a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1988 he received an honorary doctorate from Ohio State University. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathieu in Nice (Combinatorial designs and groups) and in 1962 he gave a lecture at the ICM in Stockholm (Note on the Mathieu Group ). ${\displaystyle M_{12}}$

His PhD students include Robert McEliece and Donald Knuth . He also suggested the subject of John Griggs Thompson's dissertation .

Fonts

• The Theory of Groups. MacMillan, New York NY 1959.
• Combinatorial Theory. Blaisdell Publishing, Waltham MA 1967.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Marshall Hall (mathematician). In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Biography at Ohio State University