|
John Henry Constantine Whitehead FRS〔 (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 Chennai (then known as Madras), in India, and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1960. ==Life== J. H. C. (Henry) Whitehead was the son of the Right Rev. Henry Whitehead, Bishop of Madras, who had studied mathematics at Oxford, and was the nephew of Alfred North Whitehead and Isobel Duncan. He was brought up in Oxford, went to Eton and read mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he co-founded The Invariant Society, the student mathematics society.〔The Early History of the Invariant Society by Robin Wilson, printed in The Invariant (2010), Ben Hoskin〕 After a year working as a stockbroker (Buckmaster & Moore), 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.〔Paul Gannon, ''Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret'', 2006, Atlantic Books; ISBN 1-84354-330-3. p. 347〕 Those methods included the Colossus machines, early digital electronic computers.〔 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.〔(【引用サイトリンク】''MacTutor History of Mathematics archive'' )〕 The LMS established two prizes in memory of Whitehead. The first is the annually awarded, to multiple recipients, Whitehead Prize; the second a biennially awarded Senior Whitehead Prize.〔(【引用サイトリンク】List of LMS prize winners )〕 J.J. Rotman, in his book on algebraic topology, as a tribute to Whitehead's intellect, says, "There is a canard that every textbook of algebraic topology either ends with the definition of the Klein bottle or is a personal communication to J. H. C. Whitehead."〔http://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387966786〕 Whitehead died from an asymptomatic heart attack during a visit to Princeton University in May 1960. In the late 1950s, Whitehead had approached Robert Maxwell, then chairman of Pergamon Press, to start a new journal, ''Topology'', however Whitehead died before its first edition appeared in 1962. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「J. H. C. Whitehead」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|