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Henry Whitehead

John Henry Constantine Whitehead (11 November 1904–8 May 1960), was one of the founders of modern algebraic topology. His contributions include

• CW complexes; these were introduced in his papers on
• combinatorial homotopy?, which in turn were one prime source of inspiration for Brown, Higgins and Sivera’s, Nonabelian Algebraic Topology and also for Baues’ extensive work on, for instance, Combinatorial Homotopy and 4-Dimensional Complexes;
• simple homotopy theory;
• the Whitehead group? which is a precursor of constructions in algebraic K-theory;
• with Saunders Mac Lane, first characterisation of homotopy 2-types.
• founder of the algebraic homotopy programme;
• one of the founders of the influential journal Topology.

References

• English Wikipedia page
• MacTutor biography

category: people