Patrick Michael Grundy

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Patrick Michael Grundy (born November 16, 1917 in Yarmouth (Isle of Wight) , † November 4, 1959 ) was a British mathematician.

Life

Grundy went to Malvern College on a scholarship and received three math awards. From 1936 he studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge ( Clare College ), received top grades in the second part of the Tripos and an award in part 3. He then became a research student in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra with William Vallance Douglas Hodge in 1939. In 1941 he received the Smith Prize for his essay The Theory of R-Modules . In 1942 he became a member of the London Mathematical Society and in 1943 Assistant Lecturer at the University of Hull . Since he did not like lectures, he gave up in 1944. In 1945 he received his doctorate in Cambridge .

After the Second World War he turned to statistics and learned this at the Rothamsted Experimental Station on a grant from the British Department of Agriculture. After graduating in 1949, he was employed there as an experimental officer and in 1951 promoted to senior experimental officer . From 1954 to 1958 he was a statistician at the National Institute for Educational Research. Shortly before his death, he was in the biometric research group at Oxford. He married in early 1959. He died in an accident in November 1959.

He is known for his contributions to combinatorial game theory . In 1939 he proved the Sprague-Grundy theorem independently of Roland Sprague . Various concepts that play a role in the analysis of such combinatorial games ( impartial games , neutral games) (Grundy number, Grundy function) are named after him.

His influential statistical work includes Economic choice of the amount of experimentation from 1956 with DH Rees and MJR Healy (* 1923).

Fonts

In addition to the works cited in the text or in the footnotes:

  • A generalization of additive ideal theory , Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Volume 38, 1942: 241-79
  • with RS Scorer, CAB Smith: Some binary games , Mathematical Gazette, Volume 28, 1944: 96-103
  • On integrally dependent integral domains , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, A, 240, 1947, pp. 295-326
  • with CAB Smith: Disjunctive games with the last player losing , Proc. Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 52, 1956, pp. 527-533, doi: 10.1017 / S0305004100031510

literature

  • LS Goddard: Patrick Michael Grundy. J. London Math. Soc., Vol. 35, 1960, pp. 377-379, doi : 10.1112 / jlms / s1-35.3.377
  • Cedric AB Smith: Patrick Michael Grundy 1917-1959. J. Royal Statistical Society, Series A, Volume 123, 1960, pp. 221-222, online (free access)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Patrick M. Grundy: Mathematics and games. In: Eureka. The journal of the Archimedeans. Volume 2, 1939, pp. 6-8, reprint Eureka, Volume 27 (1940), pp. 9-11, ISSN  0071-2248 ( online version ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ))
  2. ↑ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 18, 1956, pp. 32-49
personal data
SURNAME Grundy, Patrick Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Yarmouth (Isle of Wight)
DATE OF DEATH 4th November 1959