Robert Thomason

Robert Wayne Thomason (born November 5, 1952 in Tulsa , † November 1995 in Paris ) was an American mathematician who a. a. dealt with algebraic K-theory .

Live and act

Robert Thomason studied at Michigan State University (Master in 1973) and received his doctorate in 1977 from Princeton University under John Coleman Moore with a thesis on topological methods (homotopy theory) in category theory. He was then a Moore Instructor at MIT and from 1979 Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago . In 1978 he published an important paper with Peter May on Infinite Loop Spaces. In 1980 he gave up his position in Chicago when a mistake was discovered in his proof of one of the Quillen-Lichtenbaum conjectures about the connections between Étale Cohomology and theory . He then went to MIT and the Institute for Advanced Study , where he completed his proof of conjecture for a special case. In particular, he formulated the Quillen-Lichtenbaum conjectures as a special case of more general conjectures (“Homotopy Limit Problem”). In 1983 he was at Johns Hopkins University and in 1987 on a Sloan scholarship at Rutgers University . During this time he worked on some of Alexander Grothendieck's assumptions from his "SGA 6", which he presented at the 1990 International Mathematicians' Congress in Kyoto ( The local to global principle in algebraic K-theory ) and the results (with Thomas Trobaugh as co- Author) appeared in the third volume of the “Grothendieck Festschrift”. From 1989 he was with Max Karoubi at the University of Paris VII and worked on algebraic theory (he was also co-editor of the magazine " -Theory"). He had been suffering from diabetes for a long time . In 1995 he died of diabetic shock in his Paris apartment a few days before his 43rd birthday. ${\displaystyle K}$ ${\displaystyle K}$ ${\displaystyle K}$

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Robert Thomason. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Biography of Bak, Weibel
• Obituary in the Notices of the AMS 1996, PDF file (119 kB)
• Weibel: The mathematical enterprises of Robert Thomason. Bulletin AMS 1997.

Remarks

1. ↑ Robert Thomason in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ^ RW Thomason: Algebraic theory and étale cohomology. ${\displaystyle K}$Annales Scient. École Normale Superieure, Vol. 18, 1985, pp. 437-552; Erratum, Vol. 22, 1989, pp. 675-677.
3. ↑ He was already dead by then. Thomason employed him as a co-author, as the solution, mediated by Trobaugh, appeared to him in a dream.
4. ↑ Higher algebraic theory of Schemes and of Derived Categories. ${\displaystyle K}$