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Marshall Hall (mathematician)

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Marshall Hall, Jr.
Marshall Hall, Jr.
Born(1910-09-17)17 September 1910
St Louis, Missouri U.S.
Died4 July 1990(1990-07-04) (aged 79)
London, UK
NationalityAmerican
Alma materCambridge University
Yale University
Known forGroup theory, Combinatorics
Scientific career
FieldsMathematician
InstitutionsYale University
Ohio State University
California Institute of Technology
Emory University
Doctoral advisorØystein Ore
Doctoral studentsRobert Calderbank
Donald Knuth
Robert McEliece
E. T. Parker

Marshall Hall, Jr. (17 September 1910, St Louis, Missouri – 4 July 1990, London) was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to group theory and combinatorics.[1]

Career

He studied mathematics at Yale, graduating in 1932. He studied for a year at Cambridge University under a Henry Fellowship working with G.H. Hardy.[2] He returned to Yale to take his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Øystein Ore.[3]

He worked in Naval Intelligence during World War II, including six months in 1944 at Bletchley Park, the center of British wartime code breaking. In 1946 he took a position at The Ohio State University. In 1959 he moved to the California Institute of Technology where, in 1973, he was named the first IBM Professor at Caltech, the first named chair in mathematics. After retiring from Caltech in 1981, he accepted a post at Emory University in 1985.

Hall died in 1990 in London on his way to a conference to mark his 80th birthday.

Contributions

He wrote a number of papers of fundamental importance in group theory, including his solution of Burnside's problem for groups of exponent 6, showing that a finitely generated group in which the order of every element divides 6 must be finite.

His work in combinatorics includes an important paper of 1943 on projective planes, which for many years was one of the most cited mathematics research papers.[4] In this paper he constructed a family of non-Desarguesian projective planes which are known today as Hall planes. He also worked on block designs and coding theory.

His classic book on group theory was well received when it came out and is still useful today. His book Combinatorial Theory came out in a second edition in 1986, published by J. Wiley & Sons.

Publications

  • Hall, Jr., Marshall (1943), "Projective planes", Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 54 (2), American Mathematical Society: 229–277, ISSN 0002-9947, JSTOR 1990331, MR 0008892
  • Hall, Jr., Marshall (1959), Theory of Groups, Macmillan, LCCN 595035, MR103215 {{citation}}: Check |lccn= value (help). Review by Wilhelm Magnus published in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. Volume 66, Number 3 (1960), 144-146 and available at http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183523505
  • Hall, Jr., Marshall; Senior, James K. (1964), The Groups of Order 2n (n ≤ 6), Macmillan, LCCN 6416861, MR168631 {{citation}}: Check |lccn= value (help). An exhaustive catalog of the 340 groups of order dividing 64 with detailed tables of defining relations, constants, and lattice presentations of each group in the notation the text defines. "Of enduring value to those interested in finite groups" (from the preface).
  • Hall, Jr., Marshall (1967), Combinatorial Theory, Blaisdell Publishing, LCCN 6711108, MR224481 {{citation}}: Check |lccn= value (help)

Notes

  1. ^ Ohio State University Obituary says "immense contributions".
  2. ^ Hall, Jr. 1989, pg. 367
  3. ^ Hall, Jr. (1989) says that Ore was only his nominal advisor and that he was mostly given help and direction by Howard Engstrom.
  4. ^ Ohio State University obituary.

References

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