CTC Wall

Charles TC Wall at the ICM in Segovia , 2006

Charles Terence Clegg "Terry" Wall (born December 14, 1936 in Bristol ) is an English mathematician who deals with topology .

Wall attended Marlborough College in the county of Wiltshire and then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University , whose " Fellow " he was from 1959 to 1964. Wall received his doctorate in 1960 under Erik Christopher Zeeman (and John Frank Adams ) ( Algebraic aspects of cobordism ). In 1960/1961 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1964 he became a reader at Oxford (and a Fellow of St. Catherine College) and in 1965 a professor at Liverpool University , where he remained until his retirement.

Wall initially dealt with the cobordism theory (by René Thom ) and was one of the founders of the surgery theory (surgery) in geometric topology. Later he dealt with the theory of singularities in differential topology and in the topology of algebraic varieties .

In 1965 he received the Junior Berwick Prize , the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1976 and the Pólya Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 1988 . In 1969 he was elected to the Royal Society , whose New Year's Eve medal he received in 1988. In 1970 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Nice ( Geometric Topology: Manifolds and Structures ) and in 1966 a lecture at the Moscow ( Homeomorphism and Diffeomorphism classification of manifolds ).

From 1972 to 1980 and from 1992 to 1996 he was on the council of the London Mathematical Society, of which he was president from 1978 to 1980. In 1990 he became a member of the Danish Academy of Sciences . He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

His PhD students include J. Michael Boardman and Andrew Casson .

Fonts

• Determination of the Cobordism Ring , Annals of Mathematics, Volume 72, 1960, pp. 292-311
• Cobordism exact sequences for differential and combinatorial manifolds Annals of Mathematics, Volume 77, 1963, pp. 1-15
• Classification of (n-1) -connected 2n-manifolds , Annals of Mathematics, Volume 75, 1962, pp. 163-189
• Classification problems in differential topology , Part 1, Classification of handlebodies, Topology, Volume 2, 1963, pp. 253-261, Part 2: Diffeomorphisms of handlebodies, Topology, Volume 2, 1963, pp. 263-272
• Poincare complexes I , Annals of Mathematics, Volume 86, 1967, pp. 213-245
• Finiteness conditions for CW complexes , Part 1, Annals of Mathematics, Volume 81, 1965, pp. 56-69, Part 2, Proc. Roy. Soc. A, Vol. 295, 1966, pp. 129-139
• Surgery of non-simply connected manifolds , Annals of Mathematics, Volume 84, 1966, pp. 217-276
• Surgery on compact manifolds. Academic Press 1970, American Mathematical Society 1999.
• A geometric introduction to topology. Addison-Wesley 1972, Dover 1993.
• with A. du Plessis: The geometry of topological stability. Oxford University Press 1995.
• Singular Points of Plane Curves. Cambridge University Press 2004.
• Editor: Proc. Liverpool Singularity Symposium 1,2, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 192, 209, Springer 1971
• Published in: Homological Group Theory, London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes 36, Cambridge University Press 1979

literature

• Andrew Ranicki, Sylvain Cappell, Jonathan Rosenberg: CTC Walls contributions to the topology of manifolds , PDF file; 444 kB, from: Ranicki, Cappell, Rosenberg (eds.): Surveys of Surgery (Papers dedicated to CTC Wall), Annals of Mathematical Studies, Princeton University Press 1999 (the second volume was published in 2000)

Web links

• Literature by and about CTC Wall in the catalog of the German National Library
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  CTC Wall. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .