Graham Higman

Not to be confused with Donald G. Higman.

Graham Higman

Graham Higman FRS (19 January 1917 – 8 April 2008) was a leading British mathematician. He is known for his contributions to group theory.

Higman was born in Louth, Lincolnshire and attended Sutton High School, Plymouth, winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1939 he co-founded The Invariant Society, the student mathematics society, and earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1941. His thesis, The units of group-rings, was written under the direction of J. H. C. Whitehead. From 1960 to 1984 he was the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Higman was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize in 1962 and the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society in 1974. He was the founder of the Journal of Algebra and its editor from 1964 to 1984.

He was also a local preacher in the Oxford Circuit of the Methodist Church. During the Second World War he was a conscientious objector, working at the Meteorological Office in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar.

He died in Oxford.

See also

• Higman–Sims group, named after Donald G. Higman, but studied also by Graham Higman.
• Higman's embedding theorem
• Feit-Higman theorem
• Higman group
• Higman's lemma
• HNN extension
• Hall–Higman theorem
• Interview on YouTube

Publications

• Graham Higman (1940), The units of group-rings, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, (2) 46: 231–248.
• Walter Feit and Graham Higman (1964), The nonexistence of certain generalized polygons., J. Algebra, 1: 114–131
• Graham Higman (1966) Odd characterisations of finite simple groups, U. of Michigan Press
• *
• Graham Higman and Elizabeth Scott (1988), Existentially closed groups, LMS Monographs, Clarendon Press, Oxford

References

• Death notice, Oxford University Gazette, 17 April 2008

External links

• .
• Graham Higman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project