J. H. C. Whitehead

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"Henry Whitehead" redirects here. For the American writer, see Henry S. Whitehead. For the British cholera researcher, see Reverend Henry Whitehead.
J. H. C. Whitehead
John Henry Constantine Whitehead
John Henry Constantine Whitehead
Born 11 November 1904 (1904-11-11)
Madras (Chennai), India
Died 8 May 1960 (aged 55)
Princeton, New Jersey
Residence United Kingdom, U.S.
Nationality British
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Oxford University
Alma mater Oxford University
Princeton University
Doctoral advisor Oswald Veblen
Doctoral students Michael Barratt
Ronald M. Brown
Wilfred H. Cockroft
Victor K. A. M. Gugenheim
Graham Higman
Peter Hilton
Ioan James
Brian Steer
Known for CW complex
Simple homotopy
Whitehead group
Whitehead manifold
Whitehead product

John Henry Constantine Whitehead (11 November 1904–8 May 1960), known as Henry, was a British mathematician and was one of the founders of homotopy theory. He was born in Madras (now known as Chennai) in India and died in Princeton, New Jersey in 1960.

Contents

[edit] Life

J. H. C. (Henry) Whitehead was the son of the Right Rev. Henry Whitehead, Bishop of Madras and brother of A. N. Whitehead, and of Isobel Duncan, who had herself studied mathematics at Oxford. He was brought up in Oxford, went to Eton and read mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford. After a year working as a stockbroker, he started a Ph.D. in 1929 at Princeton University. His thesis, titled The representation of projective spaces, was written under the direction of Oswald Veblen in 1930. While in Princeton, he also worked with Solomon Lefschetz.

He became a fellow of Balliol in 1933. In 1934 he married the concert pianist Barbara Smyth, great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Fry and a cousin of Peter Pears; they had two sons. During the Second World War he worked on operations research for submarine warfare. Later, he joined the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and by 1945 was one of some fifteen mathematicians working in the "Newmanry", a section headed by Max Newman and responsible for breaking a German teleprinter cipher using machine methods.[1] Those methods included the Colossus machines, early digital electronic computers.[1]

From 1947 to 1960 he was the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford.

He became president of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) in 1953, a post he held until 1955.[2] The LMS established two prizes in memory of J. H. C. Whitehead. The first is the annually awarded, to multiple recipients, Whitehead Prize; the second a biennially awarded Senior Whitehead Prize.[3]

In the late 1950s, Whitehead approached Robert Maxwell, then chairman of Pergamon Press, to start a new journal, Topology, but died before its first edition appeared in 1962.

[edit] Work

His definition of CW complexes gave a setting for homotopy theory that became standard. He introduced the idea of simple homotopy theory, which was later much developed in connection with algebraic K-theory. The Whitehead product is an operation in homotopy theory. The Whitehead problem on abelian groups was solved (as an independence proof) by Saharon Shelah. His involvement with topology and the Poincaré conjecture led to the creation of the Whitehead manifold. The definition of crossed modules is due to him. Whitehead also made important contributions in differential topology, particularly on triangulations and their associated smooth structures.

[edit] Selected publications

  • Whitehead, J.H.C. (1940), “On C¹ complexes”, Ann. of Math. 41: 809-824 
  • J. H. C. Whitehead, On incidence matrices, nuclei and homotopy types, Ann. of Math. (2) 42 (1941), 1197–1239.
  • J. H. C. Whitehead, Combinatorial homotopy. I., Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 55 (1949), 213–245
  • J. H. C. Whitehead, Combinatorial homotopy. II., Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 55 (1949), 453–496
  • J. H. C. Whitehead, A certain exact sequence, Ann. of Math. (2) 52 (1950), 51–110
  • J. H. C. Whitehead, Simple homotopy types, Amer. J. Math. 72 (1950), 1–57.
  • Saunders MacLane, J. H. C. Whitehead, On the 3-type of a complex, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 36 (1950), 41–48.
  • Whitehead, J.H.C. (1961), “Manifolds with tranverse fields in Euclidean space”, Ann. of Math. 73: 154-212  (published posthumously)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Paul Gannon, Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, 2006, Atlantic Books; ISBN 1-84354-330-3. p. 347
  2. ^ MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
  3. ^ LMS Prizes. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.

[edit] External links


Persondata
NAME Whitehead, J. H. C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Whitehead, John Henry Constantine
SHORT DESCRIPTION British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 11 November 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Madras (Chennai), India
DATE OF DEATH 8 May 1960
PLACE OF DEATH Princeton, New Jersey
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