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J.H.C. Whitehead

J. H. C. Whitehead
Henry whitehead age 30 approx.jpg
John Henry Constantine Whitehead
Born (1904-11-11)11 November 1904
Madras (Chennai), India
Died 8 May 1960(1960-05-08) (aged 55)
Princeton, New Jersey
Residence United Kingdom, U.S.
Nationality British
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Oxford University
Alma mater Oxford University
Princeton University
Doctoral advisor Oswald Veblen
Doctoral students Michael Barratt
Ronald Brown
Wilfred H. Cockroft
Victor K. A. M. Gugenheim
Graham Higman
Peter Hilton
Ioan James
Brian Steer
Known for CW complex
Simple homotopy
Crossed module
Whitehead group
Whitehead manifold
Whitehead product
Notable awards Senior Berwick Prize (1948)
Fellow of the Royal Society

John Henry Constantine Whitehead FRS (11 November 1904 – 8 May 1960), known as Henry, was a British mathematician and was one of the founders of homotopy theory. He was born in Chennai (then known as Madras), in India, and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1960.

J. H. C. (Henry) Whitehead was the son of the Right Rev. Henry Whitehead, Bishop of Madras, who had studied mathematics at Oxford, and was the nephew of Alfred North Whitehead and Isobel Duncan. He was brought up in Oxford, went to Eton and read mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he co-founded The Invariant Society, the student mathematics society. After a year working as a stockbroker, at Buckmaster & Moore, he started a Ph.D. in 1929 at Princeton University. His thesis, titled The representation of projective spaces, was written under the direction of Oswald Veblen in 1930. While in Princeton, he also worked with Solomon Lefschetz.

He became a fellow of Balliol in 1933. In 1934 he married the concert pianist Barbara Smyth, great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Fry and a cousin of Peter Pears; they had two sons. During the Second World War he worked on operations research for submarine warfare. Later, he joined the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and by 1945 was one of some fifteen mathematicians working in the "Newmanry", a section headed by Max Newman and responsible for breaking a German teleprinter cipher using machine methods. Those methods included the Colossus machines, early digital electronic computers.


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