Boone

William Werner Boone

Born: 16 Jan 1920 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Died: 14 Sept 1983 in Urbana, Illinois, USA

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Bill Boone obtained a doctorate from Princeton in 1952 having failed to carry out Post's suggestion of constructing a finitely presented group with insoluble word problem. Post and Markov had independently constructed semigroups with this property in 1947.

Following ideas of Turing's Boone finally proved the insolubility of the word problem for groups in 1957, two years after Novikov published his proof. He proved in 1959 that many other decision problems for groups were insoluble. From 1958 Boone worked at Illinois, Urbana where he was based for the rest of his life.

References:

  1. Obituary William Werner Boone, Bull. London Math. Soc. 17 (1985), 168-174. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996