Rimhak Ree

Korean spelling
Hangeul	이 임학
Hanja	李林 學
Revised Romanization	I im-hak
McCune- Reischauer	I imhak
See also : Korean name

Rimhak Ree , (also quoted by Im-hak Ree, born December 18, 1922 in Hamhung ; † February 9, 2005 in Vancouver ) was a Korean-Canadian mathematician who was particularly concerned with group theory , especially with finite groups .

Ree went to school in Hamhung in what is now North Korea and from 1939 studied physics at the Imperial Keijo University , a Japanese university founded in Seoul in 1924. Korea was then under Japanese rule. In 1944 he graduated in physics (mathematics degrees were not possible at the time) and then worked in an aircraft factory in Shenyang (then Fengtian) in China, which was then also under Japanese rule.
In 1945 he returned to Korea after the Japanese defeat and from 1947 taught mathematics at Seoul National University , which emerged from Keijo University. In 1949 he also published his first mathematical work in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society - in 1947 he solved a problem about power series that Max Zorn had posed in an earlier issue, and sent the solution to Zorn.
During the Korean War he fled to the south of the country and went to Canada in 1953, where he received his doctorate in 1955 at the University of British Columbia with Stephen Jennings ( Witt Algebras ). As a post-graduate student , he was a lecturer at Montana State University and then again with Jennings at the University of British Columbia. In 1959/60 he attended Columbia University . In 1961 he became an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. 1961/62 he was at Yale University .

In 1960 and 1961 he later found finite groups of the Lie type (Ree groups) named after him . He was inspired by the analysis of the fundamental work of Claude Chevalley from 1955, which also led to his first publication on finite groups in 1957, and the family of finite groups of the Lie type, newly discovered by Michio Suzuki in 1960. Ree's groups were the last missing families of finite Lie-type groups.

He was married twice and had two daughters from his first marriage and three sons from his second marriage.

In 1964 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada .

Fonts

• A family of simple groups associated with the simple Lie algebra of type G2, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 66, 1960, pp. 508-510
• A family of simple groups associated with the simple Lie algebra of type F4, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 67, 1961, pp. 115-116

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Rimhak Ree. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project