Mark Mahowald | |
---|---|
Born |
Albany, Minnesota |
December 1, 1931
Died | July 20, 2013 Illinois, United States |
(aged 81)
Nationality | United States |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Northwestern University |
Alma mater | University of Minnesota |
Doctoral advisor | Bernard Russell Gelbaum |
Doctoral students | Gary I. Gutman |
Known for | Homotopy groups of spheres |
Mark Edward Mahowald (December 1, 1931 – July 20, 2013) was an American mathematician known for work in algebraic topology.
Mahowald was born in Albany, Minnesota in 1931. He received his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota in 1955 under the direction of Bernard Russell Gelbaum with a thesis on Measure in Groups. In the sixties, he became professor at Syracuse University and around 1963 he went to Northwestern University in Chicago.
Much of Mahowald's most important works concerns the homotopy groups of spheres, especially using the Adams spectral sequence at the prime 2. He is known for constructing one of the first known infinite families of elements in the stable homotopy groups of spheres by showing that the classes survive the Adams spectral sequence for . In addition, he made extensive computations of the structure of the Adams spectral sequence and the 2-primary stable homotopy groups of spheres up to dimension 64 together with Barratt, Tangora and Kochman. Using these computations, he could show that a manifold of Kervaire invariant 1 exists in dimension 62.