James Alexander Green

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James Alexander (Sandy) Green (1926-) is a mathematician and retired Professor in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick, who is still active in the field of representation theory. He found all the representations of general linear groups over finite fields (Green 1955) and invented the Green correspondence in modular representation theory. Both Green functions in the representation theory of groups of Lie type and Green's relations in the area of semigroups are named after him. His most recent publication (2007) is a revised and augmented edition of his 1980 work, Polynomial Representations of GL_n.

He was born in 1926 in Rochester, New York, but moved to Toronto with his emigrant Scottish parents at a very early age. The family returned to Britain in 1934 when his father, F. C. Green, took up the Drapers Professorship of French at the University of Cambridge.

Educated at the Perse School, Cambridge, Sandy Green's academic career has been overwhelmingly spent in England, although his first degree was gained at St. Andrew's during the Second World War. Towards the end of the war he was assigned to work at Bletchley Park, where he assisted in the Enigma project. There he met his wife, Margaret Green: the couple married in 1950, and have two daughters and a son. Gaining his Ph.D. at St John's College, Cambridge in 1951, under the supervision of Philip Hall, his first lecturing post was at the University of Manchester. In 1965 he moved to the University of Sussex, and then in 1966 to Warwick.

He was elected to the Royal Society in 1987 and was awarded the de Morgan Medal in 2001. He now lives in Oxford.

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