Person: Sims, Charles
Charlie Sims was an American mathematician best known for his work in group theory and in particular for the discovery of one of the sporadic simple groups.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- His parents were Ernest McPherson Sims (1883-1973) and Natalie Cornelia Coffin (1899-1987).
- Ernest McPherson Sims, born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on 1 April 1883, was the President and General Manager of a Metal Forming Company.
- Charles Sims attended both Elementary and High School in his home town of Elkhart, Indiana.
- While at Harvard, Sims met Annette, born 7 October 1941, when both were singing in the choir of Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church on Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- After the award of his doctorate, Sims taught for a short while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before being appointed to Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1965.
- Charles and Annette C Sims lived at first at 52 Terhune Road in Princeton, but later moved to Allenhurst, a small town on the Atlantic Coast near Asbury Park.
- Sims' research soon turned to permutation groups and computational techniques in general.
- Sims' next paper was Computation of invariants in the theory of cyclotomic fields (1966).
- In 1967 Sims made a major breakthrough when, working with Donald Higman, he discovered the previously unknown sporadic simple group now known as the Higman-Sims group.
- The Higman-Sims group is a primitive permutation group of degree 100, has order 44 352 000 and has rank 3.
- Sims made another major breakthrough which he announced to the conference Computational Problems in Abstract Algebra held in Oxford, England, 29 August to 2 September 1967.
- The computer program that Sims refers to in the final sentence is now known as an implementation of the Schreier-Sims algorithm, a linear time algorithm devised by Sims to find the order of a permutation group given generating permutations.
- Sims announced the existence and uniqueness of Lyons' group at the conference Finite groups '72 held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 23-24 March 1972.
- At the conference Computational methods for representations of groups and algebras at the University of Essen, Essen, 1-5 April 1997, Sims and George Havas gave a presentation for this Lyons finite simple sporadic group.
- Sims' outstanding research contributions were recognised in 1972 when he received the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research.
- Let us look now at some contributions that Sims made to the teaching and administration at Rutgers University.
- Sims also organised conferences and workshops at Rutgers.
- Sims wrote two books, the first being Abstract algebra: A computational approach (1984).
- We present a summary of Sims' Preface and his Introduction.
- Charles C Sims, The State University of New Jersey New Brunswick, was elected to the Inaugural Class of Fellows.
- Indeed, from my point of view, Higman and Sims were the two people who introduced graph theory into the study of permutation groups.
Born 14 April 1937, Elkhart, Indiana, USA. Died 23 October 2017, St Petersburg, Florida, USA.
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Tags relevant for this person:
Algebra, Group Theory, Origin Usa
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
