John G. Thompson

John Griggs Thompson (born October 13, 1932) is an American mathematician at the University of Florida noted for his work in the field of finite groups. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970, the Wolf Prize in 1992, and the Abel Prize in 2008.

Biography

Thompson received his

Thompson's doctoral thesis introduced new techniques and included the solution of a problem in finite group theory which had stood for around sixty years: the nilpotency of Frobenius kernels. At the time, this achievement was noted in The New York Times.^[4]

Thompson became a figure in the progress toward the classification of finite simple groups. In 1963, he and Walter Feit proved that all nonabelian finite simple groups are of even order (the Odd Order Paper, filling a whole issue of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics). This work was recognised by the award of the 1965 Cole Prize in Algebra of the American Mathematical Society. His N-group papers classified all finite simple groups for which the normalizer of every non-identity solvable subgroup is solvable. This included, as a by-product, the classification of all minimal finite simple groups (simple groups for which every proper subgroup is solvable). This work had some influence on later developments in the classification of finite simple groups, and was quoted in the citation by Richard Brauer for the award of Thompson's Fields Medal in 1970 (Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Nice, France, 1970).

The

• Feit–Thompson theorem
• McKay–Thompson series
• Quadratic pair
• Thompson factorization
• Thompson order formula
• Thompson subgroup
• Thompson transitivity theorem
• Thompson uniqueness theorem

References

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "John G. Thompson", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• John G. Thompson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• List of mathematical articles by John G. Thompson
• Biography from the Abel Prize center Archived 2016-06-11 at the Wayback Machine