J. A. Todd
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Born | 23 August 1908 Liverpool, England |
|---|---|
| Died | 22 December 1994 Croydon, England |
| Residence | UK |
| Nationality | English |
| Field | Mathematician |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Academic advisor | H.F. Baker |
| Notable students | Roger Penrose |
| Known for | Todd class, Todd-Coxeter process |
John Arthur Todd (23 August 1908 - 22 December 1994) was a British geometer. He was born in Liverpool, and went to Trinity College of the University of Cambridge in 1925. He did research under H.F. Baker, and in 1931 took a position at the University of Manchester. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1937. He remained at Cambridge for the rest of his working life.
The Todd class in the theory of the higher-dimensional Riemann-Roch theorem is an example of a characteristic class (or, more accurately, a reciprocal of one) that was discovered by Todd in work published in 1937. It used the methods of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. The Todd-Coxeter process for coset enumeration is a major method of computational algebra, and dates from a collaboration with H.S.M. Coxeter in 1936. In 1954 he and G. C. Shephard classified the finite complex reflection groups.
