J. A. Todd

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John Arthur Todd Template:Postnominals<ref name="frs"/> (23 August 1908 – 22 December 1994) was an English mathematician who specialised in geometry.

BiographyEdit

He was born in Liverpool, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1925. He did research under H.F. Baker, and in 1931 took a position at the University of Manchester. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1937. He remained at Cambridge for the rest of his working life.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

WorkEdit

The Todd class in the theory of the higher-dimensional Riemann–Roch theorem is an example of a characteristic class (or, more accurately, a reciprocal of one) that was discovered by Todd in work published in 1937. It used the methods of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. The Todd–Coxeter process for coset enumeration is a major method of computational algebra, and dates from a collaboration with H.S.M. Coxeter in 1936. In 1953 he and Coxeter discovered the Coxeter–Todd lattice. In 1954 he and G. C. Shephard classified the finite complex reflection groups.

HonoursEdit

In March 1948 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}Template:Dead link</ref>

Selected publicationsEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

Todd's Mactutor biography

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