George W. Whitehead
George William Whitehead ( born August 2, 1918 in Bloomington, Illinois, † 12 April 2004) was an American mathematician who worked on topology.
George Whitehead studied at the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in 1941 at Norman Steenrod ( Homotopy properties of the real orthogonal groups). After that, he was instructor at Purdue University and Princeton University, and Assistant Professor at Brown University before he became in 1949 professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he received a full professorship in 1957 and went into retirement in 1985.
Whitehead was one of the pioneers of algebraic topology and homotopy theory. In the 1950s he turned early spectral sequences for the study of homotopy groups of spheres on (regardless of Jean-Pierre Serre and Henri Cartan in France). In 1942, he led the J- Homormorphismus of homotopy groups of the orthogonal groups to the homotopy groups of spheres in a expansion of a construction of Heinz Hopf. Particularly influential was his essay Generalized Homology Theories of 1962.
He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1954 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972. He was Guggenheim Fellow and 1955/56, a Fulbright Research Scholar. In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Some aspects of stable homotopy theory ).
His doctoral include Robert Aumann and John Coleman Moore.
He should not be confused with John Henry Constantine Whitehead, after, are called the Lemma of Whitehead, which leads to the definition of the K1 - group, and the set of Whitehead, which characterizes the homotopy equivalence between CW - complexes.
Writings
- Recent advances in homotopy theory, American Mathematical Society 1970
- Elements of homotopy theory, Springer Verlag, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 1978
- Homotopy Theory, MIT Press 1966