Nationality United States Fields Mathematics Name Mark Mahowald | Role Mathematician | |
Born December 1, 1931
Albany, Minnesota ( 1931-12-01 ) Institutions Northwestern University Alma mater University of Minnesota Doctoral advisor Bernard Russell Gelbaum Doctoral students Michael J. Hopkins
Gary I. Gutman Known for Homotopy groups of spheres Died July 20, 2013, Illinois, United States Similar People Michael J Hopkins, Eric Friedlander, Ioan James | ||
Academic advisor Bernard Russell Gelbaum Education University of Minnesota Notable students Michael J. Hopkins | ||
Mark Edward Mahowald (December 1, 1931 – July 20, 2013) was an American mathematician known for work in algebraic topology.
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Life
Mahowald was born in Albany, Minnesota in 1931. He received his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota in 1955 under the direction of Bernard Russell Gelbaum with a thesis on Measure in Groups. In the sixties, he became professor at Syracuse University and around 1963 he went to Northwestern University in Chicago.
Work
Much of Mahowald's most important works concerns the homotopy groups of spheres, especially using the Adams spectral sequence at the prime 2. He is known for constructing one of the first known infinite families of elements in the stable homotopy groups of spheres by showing that the classes
In addition, he contributed to the chromatic picture of the homotopy groups of spheres: His earlier work contains much on the image of the J-homomorphism and recent work together with Goerss, Henn, Karamanov and Rezk does computations in stable homotopy localized at the Morava K-theory K(2).
Besides the work on the homotopy groups of spheres and related spaces, he did important work on Thom spectra. This work was used heavily in the proof of the nilpotence theorem by Devinatz, Hopkins and Smith.
Awards and honors
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.