Henry Whitehead

John Henry Constantine Whitehead

Born: 11 Nov 1904 in Madras, India
Died: 8 May 1960 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA

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Henry Whitehead was born in India but lived in England from the age of two. While at Oxford Whitehead met Veblen (on leave from Princeton) who arranged a scholarship which enabled him to study for a Ph.D. at Princeton. Their joint work led to The Foundations of Differential Geometry (1932), now considered a clasic. It contains the first proper definition of a differentiable manifold.

Whitehead returned to England, worked at the Admiralty during the War, then he was appointed to a chair at Oxford. Soon after his return to England he wrote another major work on differential geometry On the Covering of a Complete Space by the Geodesics Through a Point (1935).

Whitehead's interests turned more towards topology and he collaborated with Lefschetz. In this area he is best remembered for his work on homotopy equivalence. He also studied Stiefel manifolds and set up a school of topology at Oxford.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. M H A Newman, John Henry Constantine Whitehead, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 7 (1961), 349-363. 
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