W. B. R. Lickorish

William Bernard Raymond Lickorish ( born February 19, 1935), usually cited as WBR Lickorish or WB Raymond Lickorish, is a British mathematician who with geometric topology, especially knot theory and 3-manifolds, busy.

Lickorish 1964 PhD Erik Christopher Zeeman in Cambridge. Later he was a professor at Cambridge, Fellow of Pembroke College, and at times head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. He is now professor emeritus.

Lickorish is one of the discoverers of the HOMFLY polynomial, a polynomial invariant of knot theory, named after the initials of the discoverer. It includes the Jones and Alexander polynomial.

In the 1960s, he proved the Lickorish - Wallace theorem ( independently by Andrew H. Wallace ), which states that every closed orientable connected 3-manifold by Dehn surgery ( Dehn -Surgery, by Max Dehn, a standard decomposition technique in the geometric topology) can be obtained from embedded in a 3- sphere node ( technically accurate Framed links). For the non - orientable case, he proved a similar set of Dehn - surgery of non- orientable 2- sphere bundles over the circle.

In 1991 he was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society and Kenneth Millett the Chauvenet Prize for the essay The New Polynomial Invariants of Knots and Links.

Writings

• An Introduction to Knot Theory, Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 1997, ISBN 0-387-98254- X.