Alfred W. Hales

Alfred Washington Hales ( born November 30, 1938 in Pasadena, California) is an American mathematician who deals with combinatorics and algebra.

Hales studied at Caltech, where he was a student twice 1958/59 Putnam Fellow. In 1960, he received his bachelor 's degree and in 1962 he earned his doctorate under Robert Dilworth at Caltech ( On the nonexistence of free complete Boolean algebras ). As a post - graduate student, he was 1962/63 at the University of Cambridge. From 1963 to 1966 he was Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University. In 1966, he was first an assistant professor and then professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he temporarily headed the faculty. He became Professor Emeritus in 1992 and headed the Center for Communications and Computing of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

1977/78 he was a visiting scientist at the University of Warwick, 1986/97 at MSRI, whose Board of Trustees he served from 1995 to 1999, and 1970/71 at the University of Washington.

He is known for the set of Hales - Jewett (1963, with Robert I. Jewett ) from the Ramsey theory. The set, the existence of regular structures at sufficiently high dimensions safely and was observed and proved by them for the example of a generalized game of Tic -Tac -Toe - type. If you play the game at a sufficiently high-dimensional cube with a given side length n and number of players c there is always a winning solution ( row, column, or diagonal of the same color ).

He provided input to the book Shift Register Sequences by Solomon W. Golomb. He also dealt with group theory and the theory of modules and associations.

In 1971, he was with Jewett and others on the first recipients of the George Pólya Prize. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society ( 2012) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is married to Virginia Green since 1962 and has one son and two daughters.