William Burnside

William Burnside ( born July 2, 1852 the Paddington area of London, † August 21 1927 in Cotleigh in West Wickham, Kent ) was an English mathematician who is best known for his contributions to group theory.

Life and work

Burnside was the son of a Scottish -born businessman; but he was brought up ( Christ's Hospital ) at the age of six years, orphan, and therefore at a school for children of poor people. After winning a scholarship, he entered in 1871 in the St. John 's College, Cambridge, but changed ( for better opportunities in the rowing team to have ) to the Pembroke College, where he emerged in the Tripos as Second Wrangler (second ) in 1875. He also won the Smith Prize and was named a Fellow of Pembroke. Burnside ( who had heard in Cambridge, Arthur Cayley among others, the astronomer John Couch Adams and George Gabriel Stokes and the physicists James Clerk Maxwell ), first became interested in hydrodynamics, to which he applied function-theoretic methods. In 1885 he became professor at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, where he remained despite offers from Cambridge to assume the chair of Stokes after his death. In 1886 he married a Scottish woman, and out of the marriage came two sons and three daughters out.

Burnside is known primarily for his work in group theory ( the theory of finite groups ), the turning towards 1893. In 1897 he published his major work, Theory of groups of finite order, the first English textbook on this area, but that was then under British mathematicians unpopular. In 1899 he was awarded the de - Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society. His most famous result is the proposition that groups of order (p, q prime) are solvable ( special cases already proved Mejdell Peter Ludwig Sylow, Ferdinand Georg Frobenius and Camille Jordan ). His conjecture that all finite groups of odd order are solvable, it was proved only in the 1960s by Walter Feit and John Griggs Thompson in a large mathematical tour de force. Even today, the Burnside problem is a driving force in group theory: it asks whether all groups finitely generated whose elements g all have a finite order (ie there is a natural number n, the group is periodic ), are finite. In the second edition of his book - group theory Burnside built a the theory of group characters of Frobenius, enriched by many of their own posts.

Most recently, Burnside turned more to the probability theory and wrote a book, which was published posthumously in 1928.

He is not to be confused with William Snow Burnside (1839-1920) of Dublin, author of Theory of Equations.

Honors

In 1893 he was appointed a member of the Royal Society ( "Fellow" ), the 1904, the Royal Medal " for his discoveries in mathematics, especially in group theory " gave him.