John Thompson is an American mathematician, finite group researcher, and professor of mathematics in Gainesville, Florida. Winner of many awards for his contribution to the development of not only mathematics, but also science in general.
early years
John Griggs Thompson was born on October 13, 1932 into an ordinary family in the small American city of Ottawa. There he spent his childhood and early youth.
Education
After leaving school, John entered Yale University, and at the age of 23, Thompson successfully graduated from it, becoming a bachelor's degree.
After that, he entered the University of Chicago to conduct various scientific research and after 4 years, in 1959, he defended his doctoral dissertation, which actually proved the Frobenius hypothesis, which remained unresolved for 60 years. John's mentor was the famous mathematician and educator Saunders MacLaine.
Since the defense of Thompson's dissertation, group theory has come to the fore as the mathematical topic that has attracted the most attention and has developed the most rapidly. The reason was that suddenly progress began on one of the main problems in the theory of finite groups, namely the classification of finite simple groups.
Later life, career of a teacher
Thompson later became an assistant at Harvard University, which he was until 1962, after which John was accepted as a professor of mathematical sciences.
In 1970 he became a professor at a prestigious British university. For 23 years Thompson worked in Cambridge, he again moved to the United States, where he worked as a professor at a prestigious university in Florida.
Scientific achievements
Thompson's contributions to mathematics are undeniable. Thanks to his work, the rapid development of the theory of finite groups and their classification began.
Personal life
Former and current colleagues and close friends of John Thompson, the great mathematician of our time, noted that Thompson is not afraid of difficulties, on the contrary, overcoming them, he gives new ideas that have a great influence on the development of mathematics.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (United States and Italy), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a member of the Royal Society of London.
Awards and prizes
Thompson has received numerous awards for his contributions to science.
In addition to the Cole Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Fields Medal in 1970, he was awarded the Berwick Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 1982, the Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society in 1985, and received the Wolf Prize and the Poincaré Prize in 1992.
John Griggs Thompson has won many international awards for profound achievements in algebra and, in particular, for the formation of modern group theory: for example, Wolf, Abel, Cole and Fields.
Thompson revolutionized the theory of finite groups by proving extraordinarily profound theorems that laid the foundation for a complete classification of finite simple groups, one of the greatest achievements of mathematics of the twentieth century.
