THOMPSON, JOHN GRIGGS

born Oct. 13, 1932, Ottawa, Kan., U.S. American mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970 for his work in group theory. Thompson earned a B.A. from Yale University, New Haven, Conn., in 1955 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1959. After a year at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (196162), he returned to the University of Chicago (196268) and subsequently moved to Churchill College, Cambridge, Eng. He received the Wolf Prize in 1992. Thompson was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice, France, in 1970. His work has been largely in group theory. In 1963 he and Walter Feit published their famous theorem that every finite simple group, other than cyclic ones, has an even number of elementsa proof requiring more than 250 pages. This was, however, only a preview of the solution to the problem of the classification of the finite simple groups; completed in 1981, the Enormous Theorem represents the combined efforts of hundreds of mathematicians and extends over approximately 5,000 pages. The work that resulted in Thompson's receiving the Fields Medal was on the problem of determining minimal simple finite groups. In a sense, the finite simple groups are the fundamental building blocks for finite groups. Thompson's work provided an early breakthrough for the overall classification problem. He made further contributions to coding theory and in the theory of finite projective planes, where he contributed to the proof of the nonexistence of a plane of order 10.