Terry Wall
| Terry Wall | |
|---|---|
In 2006
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|
| Born |
14 December 1936 Bristol |
| Nationality | British |
| Institutions | University of Liverpool |
| Alma mater |
Marlborough College Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Thesis | Algebraic aspects of cobordism (1959) |
| Doctoral advisor | Frank Adams and Christopher Zeeman |
| Notable students |
Andrew Casson Bill Bruce |
| Known for | L-theory |
| Notable awards |
Berwick Prize (1963) Senior Whitehead Prize (1976) Pólya Prize (1988) Sylvester Medal (1988) |
Charles Terence Clegg "Terry" Wall (born 14 December 1936) is a British mathematician, educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an emeritus professor of the University of Liverpool, where he was first appointed professor in 1965. From 1978 to 1980 he was the president of the London Mathematical Society.
His early work was in cobordism theory in algebraic topology; this includes his 1959 Cambridge PhD thesis entitled "Algebraic aspects of cobordism", written under the direction of Frank Adams and Christopher Zeeman. His research was then mainly in the area of manifolds, particularly geometric topology and related abstract algebra included in surgery theory, of which he was one of the founders. In 1964 he introduced the Brauer–Wall group of a field. His 1970 research monograph "Surgery on Compact Manifolds" is a major reference work in geometric topology.
In 1971 he conjectured that every finitely generated group is accessible. This conjecture is known as "Wall's conjecture". It motivated much progress in the understanding of splittings of groups. In 1985 Martin Dunwoody proved the conjecture for the class of finitely presented groups. The resolution of the full conjecture took until 1991 when, surprising to most mathematicians at the time, Dunwoody found a finitely generated group that is not accessible and hence the conjecture turned out to be not correct in its general formulation.
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