George W. Whitehead

George William Whitehead Jr. (1918 to 2004) was an American algebraic topologist and professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in Bloomington, Illinois, he took his bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago in 1937 and his doctorate there in 1941 under Norman Steenrod, as Steenrod's first Ph.D. student, with a thesis on the homotopy properties of the real orthogonal groups. After teaching at Purdue, Princeton and Brown he joined MIT in 1949 and stayed until he retired in 1985. He invented the J-homomorphism, was among the first to calculate homotopy groups of spheres systematically, and helped shape stable homotopy theory by linking spectra with generalized homology and cohomology theories. He directed thirteen Ph.D. students, among them John Coleman Moore, Edgar Brown and the later Nobel laureate Robert Aumann, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972.