Marshall Hall (mathematician)

Marshall Hall Jr. ( born September 17, 1910 in St. Louis, † July 4, 1990 in London) was an American mathematician who worked on group theory and combinatorics.

Hall studied at Yale University (Bachelor 1932) and since 1932 at Cambridge University in England, where he met, among others, Godfrey Harold Hardy, Philip Hall and Harold Davenport. In 1933 he was back at Yale, where he was in 1936 around his Ph.D. in between linear recurring sequences to isomorphism and algebraic at Øystein Ore. After a detour 1936/37, to the Institute for Advanced Study, he was instructor at Yale. During World War II he worked on Entzifferungsarbeiten the Naval Intelligence of the United States ( both Japanese codes as well as on the German Enigma ). He then returned to Yale, went in 1946 to the Ohio State University, where he became professor in 1948, and in 1959 to Caltech, where he retired in 1981. 1985 until his death in 1990 he was a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta. In addition, he was a visiting professor at Oxford University, the Technion in Haifa and at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Hall wrote a widely used textbook on group theory. He solved the Burnside problem for exponent six, and published in 1943 an important work on finite projective planes ( Projective Planes. Transactions American Mathematical Society, Bd.54, 1943, p.229 -277 ). In combinatorics, he continued to address among other things, block designs.

Hall was Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1988 he became an honorary doctorate from Ohio State University. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Combinatorial designs and groups) and in Stockholm in 1962 ( Note on the Mathieu Group).

His doctoral include Robert McEliece and Donald Knuth. He also suggested the theme of the dissertation of John Griggs Thompson.

Writings

• Combinatorial Theory. Blaisdell Publishing, Waltham MA 1967.