J. H. C. Whitehead
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Born | 11 November 1904 Madras (Chennai), India |
|---|---|
| Died | 8 May 1960 Princeton, New Jersey |
| Residence |  United Kingdom,  U.S. |
| Nationality | British |
| Field | Mathematics |
| Institution | Oxford University |
| Alma mater | Oxford University Princeton University |
| Academic advisor | Oswald Veblen |
| Notable 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.
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[edit] Life
J. H. C. Whitehead was brought up in Oxford, and was educated at Eton College and Balliol College of Oxford University, reading mathematics. 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. 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.
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.
He was the nephew of Alfred North Whitehead.
[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.
[edit] Publications
- 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.
[edit] See also
- Simple homotopy
- Spanier-Whitehead duality
- Whitehead group
- Whitehead link
- Whitehead theorem
- Whitehead torsion
[edit] References
- ^ a b Paul Gannon, Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, 2006, Atlantic Books; ISBN 1-84354-330-3. p. 347
[edit] External links
- J. H. C. Whitehead at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "J. H. C. Whitehead". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
