Robert Louis Griess, Jr. (born 1945, Savannah, Georgia) is a mathematician working on

finite simple group Finite is the opposite of infinite. It may refer to: * Finite number (disambiguation) * Finite set, a set whose cardinality (number of elements) is some natural number * Finite verb, a verb form that has a subject, usually being inflected or marked ...

s and vertex algebras. He is currently the John Griggs Thompson Distinguished University Professor of mathematics at University of Michigan.

Education

Griess developed a keen interest in mathematics prior to entering undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1963. There, he eventually earned a Ph.D. in 1971 under the supervision of

John Griggs Thompson John Griggs Thompson (born October 13, 1932) is an American mathematician at the University of Florida noted for his work in the field of finite groups. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970, the Wolf Prize in 1992, and the Abel Prize in 2008. ...

after defending a dissertation on the

Schur multiplier In mathematical group theory, the Schur multiplier or Schur multiplicator is the second homology group H_2(G, \Z) of a group ''G''. It was introduced by in his work on projective representations. Examples and properties The Schur multiplier \oper ...

s of the then-known

Research

Griess' early work focused on group extensions, cohomology and Schur multipliers, as well as on the classification of finite simple groups and their properties. He was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1981. In 1982, he published the first construction of the monster group using the Griess algebra, for which he was awarded the 2010

AMS AMS or Ams may refer to: Organizations Companies * Alenia Marconi Systems * American Management Systems * AMS (Advanced Music Systems) * ams AG, semiconductor manufacturer * AMS Pictures * Auxiliary Medical Services Educational institutions * A ...

Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. He was an invited speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in Warsaw in 1983 to give a lecture on his construction of the monster group, which he called the ''friendly giant''. He is a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

(2020) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007). In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Since 2006, Robert Griess has been a member of the editorial board of Electronic Research Announcements of the AIMS (ERA-AIMS), a peer-review journal.

Selected publications

Books

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Journal articles

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References

External links

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Homepage
at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan {{DEFAULTSORT:Griess, Robert L. Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Group theorists University of Michigan faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 1945 births