Robert Griess

Robert Louis Griess Jr. ( born October 10, 1945 in Savannah, Georgia) is an American mathematician who deals with the theory of finite groups and one of the discoverers called ( with Bernd Fischer) of the "monster" finite simple group.

Life and work

Griess went to Pittsburgh to school, studied at the University of Chicago ( 1967 Bachelor, Masters 1968) and was there in 1971 with John Griggs Thompson PhD ( Schur multipliers of the known finite simple groups). From 1971 he was at the University of Michigan, first as Instructor Hildebrandt, from 1973 as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor in 1976 and 1981 as a full professor. 1979/80, 1981 and 1994, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He also has been a visiting professor at Yale, at Rutgers University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, at the École normale supérieure ( 1986/87 as Maître de recherche of the CNRS) and at the Chinese Zhejiang University and the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.

1981/82 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1983 he was invited speaker on the ICM in Warsaw (The sporadic simple groups and construction of the Monster ).

Griess is known for his design of the "Monster " (also called by him " Friendly Giant" ), the largest sporadic simple group as a representation in an algebra of matrices on a 196 883 - dimensional vector space over the rational numbers, the " Griess algebra ". The existence of the monster was from group theoretical considerations independent of semolina and Bernd Fischer 1973 suspected, but only the explicit construction provided an existence proof. As part of the construction also found many more (twenty) previously discovered sporadic groups their place, so that this unified as a kind of theory of sporadic simple groups can be considered. The product leaves a structure invariant and uses the Leech lattice. The ability to construct such a representation was the end of 1979, as Griess conducted his research in this regard, given the high order of the monster secured in any way.

In 2010 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Writings

  • The friendly giant. Inventiones Mathematicae, vol 69, 1982, p 1-102, online.
  • Twelve sporadic groups. Springer 1998.
  • The construction of as automorphisms of a 196,883 dimensional algebra, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bd.78, 1981, S.686 -691, online, pdf file
Savannah (Georgia) Georgia (U.S. state) Bernd Fischer (mathematician) Monster group Classification of finite simple groups Name Authority File
687088
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