Graham Higman
Graham Higman | |
---|---|
LMS De Morgan Medal (1974) Sylvester Medal (1979) | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics, Group theory |
Institutions | University of Oxford |
Doctoral advisor | J. H. C. Whitehead |
Doctoral students |
Graham Higman FRS[1] (19 January 1917 – 8 April 2008) was a prominent English mathematician known for his contributions to group theory.
Biography
Higman was born in Louth, Lincolnshire, and attended Sutton High School, Plymouth, winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.[2] In 1939 he co-founded The Invariant Society, the student mathematics society,[3] and earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1941. His thesis, The units of group-rings, was written under the direction of J. H. C. Whitehead. From 1960 to 1984 he was the
Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford
.
Higman was awarded the
Senior Berwick Prize in 1962 and the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society in 1974. He was the founder of the Journal of Algebra and its editor from 1964 to 1984. Higman had 51 D.Phil. students, including Jonathan Lazare Alperin, Rosemary A. Bailey, Marston Conder, John Mackintosh Howie, and Peter M. Neumann
.
He was also a
Meteorological Office in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar
.
He died in Oxford.[2]
Publications
- Higman, Graham (1940). "The units of group-rings". .
- .
- Graham Higman (1966) Odd characterisations of finite simple groups, U. of Michigan Press
- *Graham Higman (1974), Finitely presented infinite simple groups, Notes on Pure Mathematics, vol. 8, Department of Pure Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, I.A.S. Australian National University, Canberra, MR 0376874
- Graham Higman and Elizabeth Scott (1988), Existentially closed groups, LMS Monographs, Clarendon Press, Oxford[4]
See also
- Higman–Sims group, named after Donald G. Higman, but studied also by Graham Higman.
- Higman's embedding theorem
- Feit-Higman theorem
- Higman group
- Higman's lemma
- HNN extension
- Hall–Higman theorem
Notes
- S2CID 250093355.
- ^ a b Collins, Michael (8 May 2008). "Professor Graham Higman: Leading group theorist". Obituaries. The Independent. Retrieved 14 October 2008.
- ^ The Early History of the Invariant Society by Robin Wilson, printed in The Invariant (2010), Ben Hoskin
- .
References
- Interview on YouTube
- Death notice, Oxford University Gazette, 17 April 2008 Archived 24 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine