J. H. C. Whitehead

John Henry Constantine Whitehead (11 November 1904 to 8 May 1960), known as Henry, was a British mathematician and one of the founders of homotopy theory. He was born in Chennai, then known as Madras, in British India, and died in Princeton, New Jersey. The son of the Right Rev. Henry Whitehead, Bishop of Madras, and a nephew of Alfred North Whitehead, he was brought up in Oxford, went to Eton and read mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford. After a year as a stockbroker he began a PhD at Princeton University in 1929, with a thesis on the representation of projective spaces written under Oswald Veblen, and he became a fellow of Balliol in 1933.