Michael Aschbacher

Michael Aschbacher ( born April 8, 1944 in Little Rock, Arkansas) is an American mathematician who had a leading role in the classification of finite simple groups program that became a provisional conclusion in the 1980s. He deals with the theory of finite groups, combinatorics and algebraic groups.

Aschbacher studied at Caltech (Bachelor 1966) and at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where he earned his doctorate under Richard Bruck 1969 ( collineation groups of symmetric block designs ). 1969/70 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois. From 1970 he was back at Caltech, where he received a full professorship in 1976. He is currently " Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics " at Caltech.

Aschbacher was a driving force in the classification of finite simple groups proof. A still remaining gap in the proof, in the case of " quasi- thin groups", he graduated in 2004 with Stephen D. Smith. But this work comprises some 1300 pages.

In 2012 he was awarded with Richard Lyons, Stephen D. Smith and Ronald Solomon the Leroy P. Steele Prize for her book Classification of finite simple groups: Groups of characteristic 2 -type (AMS 2011), the above as a continuation and update of Daniel Gore stone Overview the classification program was designed in 1983 ( and the program represents an example of groups of characteristic 2 ).

In 1980 he received the Cole prize in algebra ( for his work A characterization of Chevalley groups over fields of odd order). In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2011 him the Rolf Schock Prize for Mathematics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm was awarded. He was awarded the 2012 Wolf Prize in Mathematics awarded (jointly with Luis Caffarelli ). In 1978 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki (A survey of the classification of finite simple groups of program even characteristic ).

1996 to 1998 he was vice president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS ), whose fellow he is.

Writings

• By Stephen D. Smith: The classification of quasi- thin groups I and II, AMS, 2004, ISBN 0-8218-3410- X ISBN 0-8218-3411-8 and.
• Finite group theory. Cambridge University Press 2000, ISBN 0,521,786,754th
• Sporadic groups. Cambridge University Press 1994, ISBN 0-521-42049-0.
• 3- transposition groups. Cambridge University Press 1997, ISBN 0-521-57196-0.
• The finite simple groups and Their classification. Yale University Press 1980, ISBN 0-300-02449-5.
• Over Groups of Sylow subgroups in sporadic groups. Memoirs of the AMS, 1986, ISBN 0-8218-2344-2.
• With Lyons, Smith, Solomon Classification of finite simple groups: groups of characteristic 2 -type, AMS 2011