John Leech (21 July 1926 in

Weybridge Weybridge () is a town in the Borough of Elmbridge in Surrey, England, around southwest of central London. The settlement is recorded as ''Waigebrugge'' and ''Weibrugge'' in the 7th century and the name derives from a crossing point of the ...

, Surrey – 28 September 1992 in

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to th ...

) was a British

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

working in

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Math ...

geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...

and

combinatorial group theory In mathematics, combinatorial group theory is the theory of free groups, and the concept of a presentation of a group by generators and relations. It is much used in geometric topology, the fundamental group of a simplicial complex having in a nat ...

. He is best known for his discovery of the

Leech lattice In mathematics, the Leech lattice is an even unimodular lattice Λ24 in 24-dimensional Euclidean space, which is one of the best models for the kissing number problem. It was discovered by . It may also have been discovered (but not published) by ...

in 1965. He also discovered Ta(3) in 1957. Leech was married to

Jenifer Haselgrove Jenifer Leech (née Wheildon Brown; later Haselgrove; 3 August 1930 – 13 March 2015) was a British physicist and computer scientist. She is most noted for her formulation of ray tracing equations in a cold magneto- plasma, now widely known in t ...

, a British radio scientist.

References

External links

MacTutor History of Mathematics biography
20th-century British mathematicians 1926 births 1992 deaths {{UK-mathematician-stub