James J. Andrews (mathematician)

James J. Andrews (March 18, 1930 – July 28, 1998) was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Florida State University who specialized in knot theory, topology, and group theory.^[1]

Andrews was born March 18, 1930, in Seneca Falls, New York.^[1] He did his undergraduate studies at Hofstra College,^[1] and earned his doctorate in 1957 from the University of Georgia under the supervision of M. K. Fort, Jr.^[2] He worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Georgia, and the University of Washington before joining the FSU faculty in 1961. Andrews was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1963-64.^[3] From 1965-67, he looked into cryptology research at the Institute for Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.[1] He retired in 1994,^[1]^[4] and died July 28, 1998, in Tallahassee, Florida.^[1]^[5]

Andrews is known with Morton L. Curtis for the Andrews–Curtis conjecture concerning Nielsen transformations of balanced group presentations.^[1] Andrews and Curtis formulated the conjecture in a 1965 paper;^[6] it remains open.

References[edit]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Sumners, De Witt (October 1998), "Mathematics professor James Andrews", Florida State Times, 4, archived from the original on August 19, 2012.
^ James J. Andrews at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
^ Institute for Advanced Study: A Community of Scholars Archived 2013-01-06 at the Wayback Machine
^ Retired faculty, Florida State University General Bulletin 1998-1999, retrieved 2011-07-13. Backed up to Internet Archive Wayback Machine
^ View from the Chair, Florida State University Mathematics Department, Spring 2000, retrieved 2011-07-13.
^ Andrews, J. J.; Curtis, M. L. (1965), "Free groups and handlebodies", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 16 (2): 192–195, doi:10.2307/2033843, JSTOR 2033843, MR 0173241.