William Werner Boone (16 January 1920 in Cincinnati – 14 September 1983 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American mathematician. He completed his undergrad degree as a part time student at the University of Cincinnati.[1]
William Werner Boone | |
|---|---|
 William W. Boone and Eileen Boone at Altgeld Hall, University of Illinois, 1979 | |
| Born | January 16, 1920 |
| Died | September 14, 1983 (aged 63) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Known for | Boone–Higman theorem Boone–Rogers theorem Novikov–Boone theorem |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Institute for Advanced Study |
| Doctoral advisor | Alonzo Church |
Alonzo Church was his Ph.D. advisor at Princeton, and Kurt Gödel was his friend at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Pyotr Novikov showed in 1955 that there exists a finitely presented group G such that the word problem for G is undecidable.[2] A different proof was obtained by Boone in a paper published in 1958.[3]
Selected publications edit
- W. W. Boone, Decision problems about algebraic and logical systems as a whole and recursively enumerable degrees of unsolvability. 1968 Contributions to Math. Logic (Colloquium, Hannover, 1966), North-Holland, Amsterdam.
- W. W. Boone, Roger Lyndon, Frank Cannonito, Word Problems: Decision Problem in Group Theory, North-Holland, 1973.
References edit
- ^ bio of Boone
- ^ Novikov, Pyotr S. (1955), "On the algorithmic unsolvability of the word problem in group theory", Proceedings of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics (in Russian), 44: 1–143, Zbl 0068.01301
- ^ Boone, William W. (1958), "The word problem" (PDF), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 44 (10): 1061–1065, Bibcode:1958PNAS...44.1061B, doi:10.1073/pnas.44.10.1061, PMC 528693, PMID 16590307, Zbl 0086.24701
- Kurt Gödel: Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman, Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G, ISBN 978-0-19-850073-5.
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "William Werner Boone", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- William Werner Boone at the Mathematics Genealogy Project