| Marshall Hall | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 September 1910 St Louis, Missouri U.S. |
| Died | 4 July 1990 (aged 79) London, UK |
| Residence | U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions | Yale University Ohio State University California Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | Cambridge University Yale University |
| Doctoral advisor | Øystein Ore |
| Doctoral students | Donald Knuth, E. T. Parker |
| Known for | Group theory |
Marshall Hall, Jr. (17 September 1910, St Louis, Missouri – 4 July 1990, London) was an American mathematician who made contributions to group theory and combinatorics.
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He studied mathematics at Yale, graduating in 1932. He studied further at Cambridge University, returning to Yale to take his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Øystein Ore.
He worked in Naval Intelligence during World War II, and in 1946 took a position at The Ohio State University. In 1959 he moved to the California Institute of Technology and in 1985 he accepted a post at Emory University.
Hall died in 1990 in London on his way to a conference to mark his 80th birthday.
He wrote a number of papers of fundamental importance in group theory, including his solution of Burnside's problem for groups of exponent 6, showing that a finitely generated group in which the order of every element divides 6 must be finite.
His work in combinatorics includes an important paper of 1943 on projective planes: he also worked on block designs.
His book on group theory was well received when it came out and is still useful today.