WBR Lickorish

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WBR Lickorish in Berkeley

William Bernard Raymond Lickorish (born February 19, 1938 ), mostly cited as WBR Lickorish or WB Raymond Lickorish , is a British mathematician who deals with geometric topology , especially knot theory and 3-manifolds.

Lickorish received his PhD in 1964 from Erik Christopher Zeeman in Cambridge . He was later a professor at Cambridge, a fellow at Pembroke College and temporarily head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. He has now retired.

Lickorish is one of the discoverers of the HOMFLY polynomial, a polynomial invariant of knot theory, named after the first letter of the discoverer. It includes the Jones and Alexander polynomials.

In the 1960s, he proved the Lickorish-Wallace theorem (regardless of Andrew H. Wallace ), which states that any closed orientable connected 3-manifold by Dehn surgery ( Dehn-Surgery , by Max Dehn , a standard separation technique the geometric topology) can be obtained from entanglements embedded in a 3-sphere (technically more precisely framed links ). For the non-orientable case, he proved a similar theorem for stretching surgery from non-orientable 2-sphere bundles above the circle.

In 1991 he received the Senior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society and, with Kenneth Millett, the Chauvenet Prize for the essay The New Polynomial Invariants of Knots and Links .

Fonts

  • An Introduction to Knot Theory , Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 1997, ISBN 0-387-98254-X .

Web links

References

  1. Jim Hoste, Adrian Ocneanu, Kenneth Millett, Peter Freyd, WBR Lickorish, David Yetter: A new polynomial invariant of knots and links , Bulletin of the AMS 12, 1985, pp. 239-246
  2. ^ WBR Lickorish: A representation of orientable combinatorial 3-manifolds , Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, Vol. 76, 1962, pp. 531-540, Homeomorphisms of non-orientable two-manifolds , Proceedings Cambridge Philosophical Society 59, 1963, p 307-317
  3. ^ Mathematics Magazine 61, 1988, pp. 2-23