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Person: Temple, George Frederick James

Ioan James is an English mathematician who works in topology and the history of mathematics.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• After completing his education at Oxford, James went to the United States for the year 1954-55.
• Returning to England, James was Tapp Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge in 1956 before returning to the University of Oxford.
• Back at Oxford in 1957, James was appointed Reader in Pure Mathematics, a post which he held until 1969.
• In 1970 James was appointed to the famous chair of Savilian Professor of Geometry.
• James was elected a Fellow of New College Oxford in 1970 when he became Savilian Professor of Geometry and he continues to hold the fellowship.
• James has done wide ranging work in topology, particularly in homotopy theory.
• James then published on suspensions, on multiplication on spheres, on cup-products, and, another publication with Henry Whitehead, Homology with zero coefficients.
• The mathematical works of J H C Whitehead appeared in four volumes in 1962 and 1963 edited by James.
• In 1976 James published The topology of Stiefel manifolds which was based on his lecture notes.
• In 1987 James published Topological and uniform spaces which was written for advanced undergraduates or new graduate students.
• Introduction to uniform spaces (1989) is again based on lectures given by James at the University of Oxford.
• James published Handbook of algebraic topology in 1995.
• James became an editor of Topology in 1962 and he has continued in that role ever since.
• On the 25th anniversary of the founding of the journal, James gave an address in which he related much of the early history of the publication with which he has been so closely associated.
• James has received many honours for his major contributions to mathematics.
• Over the last ten years, James has produced a number of outstanding historical studies.
• This was especially true of topology, and the prince of Princeton topologists for most of that time was James Waddell Alexander.
• In 2002 James published Remarkable mathematicians : From Euler to von Neumann.
• A deeper look at twenty mathematical personalities occurs in James' book The mind of the mathematician (2007) written jointly with Michael Fitzgerald.
• This theme is explored in another recent book by James, Asperger's Syndrome and High Achievement : Some Very Remarkable People (2005).
• James' Remarkable mathematicians is in fact the first of a "Remarkable" collection of books by James.

Born 23 May 1928, Croydon, Surrey, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Tags relevant for this person:

Origin England, Topology

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

Github:

non-Github:

@J-J-O'Connor

@E-F-Robertson

References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive