Alfred W. Hales

Alfred Washington Hales (born November 30, 1938) is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the namesakes of the Hales–Jewett theorem. He was born in Pasadena, California.^[1]

Professional career

As an undergraduate, Hales was a two-time Putnam Fellow for the California Institute of Technology, in 1958 and 1959.^[2] Hales stayed at Caltech for his graduate studies, earning his Ph.D. in 1962 under the supervision of Robert P. Dilworth.^[3] He is the former chair of the mathematics department at UCLA, and in 2010 became chair of the board of trustees of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA.^[4]

Contributions

The Hales–Jewett theorem was published by Hales and Jewett in 1963. Now a standard part of Ramsey theory, Hales and Jewett motivated their theorem as a form of game theory: it shows that certain high-dimensional generalizations of tic tac toe cannot have any tied positions.

Hales also contributed to Solomon W. Golomb's highly cited work on shift registers,^[5] and he has been noted for his work using Ulm invariants to characterize infinite abelian groups.^[6]

Awards and honors

In 1971, Hales shared the George Pólya Prize with Ronald Graham, Klaus Leeb, Bruce Lee Rothschild, and R. I. Jewett, for their work in Ramsey theory.^[7] In 2009, Hales was elected a Fellow of the AAAS,^[6] and in 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[8]

Selected publications

• Hales, A. W.; Jewett, R. I. (1963), "Regularity and positional games", Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 106: 222–229, doi:10.2307/1993764, MR 0143712 

References