- Marshall Hall (mathematician)
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Marshall Hall Born 17 September 1910
St Louis, Missouri U.S.Died 4 July 1990 (aged 79)
London, UKResidence U.S. Nationality American Fields Mathematician Institutions Yale University
Ohio State University
California Institute of TechnologyAlma mater Cambridge University
Yale UniversityDoctoral advisor Øystein Ore Doctoral students Donald Knuth, E. T. Parker Known for Group theory Marshall Hall, Jr. (17 September 1910, St Louis, Missouri – 4 July 1990, London) was an American mathematician who made contributions to group theory and combinatorics.
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Career
He studied mathematics at Yale, graduating in 1932. He studied further at Cambridge University, returning to Yale to take his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Øystein Ore.
He worked in Naval Intelligence during World War II, and in 1946 took a position at The Ohio State University. In 1959 he moved to the California Institute of Technology and in 1985 he accepted a post at Emory University.
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: he also worked on block designs.
His book on group theory was well received when it came out and is still useful today.
Publications
- Hall, Jr., Marshall (1959), Theory of Groups, Macmillan, LCCN 595035, MR103215. 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. 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
References
External links
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Marshall Hall jr", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hall_Marshall.html.
- Obituary at Ohio State University
- Marshall Hall (mathematician) at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
Categories:- 1910 births
- 1990 deaths
- 20th-century mathematicians
- American mathematicians
- Algebraists
- Group theorists
- Emory University faculty
- American mathematician stubs
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