Roger Lyndon

Roger Conant Lyndon (December 18, 1917 – June 8, 1988) was an American mathematician, for many years a professor at the University of Michigan. He is known for Lyndon words, the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem, Craig–Lyndon interpolation and the Lyndon–Hochschild–Serre spectral sequence.

Lyndon was born on December 18, 1917 in Calais, Maine, the son of a Unitarian minister. His mother died when he was two years old, after which he and his father moved several times to towns in Massachusetts and New York. He did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, originally intending to study literature but eventually settling on mathematics, and graduated in 1939. He took a job as a banker, but soon afterwards returned to graduate school at Harvard, earning a master's degree in 1941. After a brief teaching stint at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he returned to Harvard for the third time in 1942 and while there taught navigation as part of the V-12 Navy College Training Program while earning his Ph.D. He received his doctorate in 1946 under the supervision of Saunders Mac Lane.

After graduating from Harvard, Lyndon worked at the Office of Naval Research and then for five years as an instructor and assistant professor at Princeton University before moving to Michigan in 1953. At Michigan, he shared an office with Donald G. Higman; his notable doctoral students there included Kenneth Appel and Joseph Kruskal.

Lyndon died on June 8, 1988, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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