Life
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 The Invariant Society, the student mathematics society. After a year working as a stockbroker (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.
From 1947 to 1960 he was the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford.
He became president of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) in 1953, a post he held until 1955. The LMS established two prizes in memory of Whitehead. The first is the annually awarded, to multiple recipients, Whitehead Prize; the second a biennially awarded Senior Whitehead Prize.
In the late 1950s, Whitehead approached Robert Maxwell, then chairman of Pergamon Press, to start a new journal, Topology, but died before its first edition appeared in 1962.
Read more about this topic: J. H. C. Whitehead
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.”
—Henry Miller (18911980)
“There is hope for the future. When the world is ready for a new and better life all this will some day come to pass in Gods good time.”
—Earl Felton, and Richard Fleischer. Captain Nemo (James Mason)
“One of the lies would make it out that nothing
Ever presents itself before us twice.
Where would we be at last if that were so?
Our very life depends on everythings
Recurring till we answer from within.”
—Robert Frost (18741963)