Morton L. Curtis

Morton Landers Curtis was an American mathematician, born in Texas in 1921, and an expert on group theory. He earned a bachelor degree at Texas A and I University in 1948 and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1951 under Raymond Louis Wilder, taught at Florida State University, and then became the W. L. Moody, Jr. Professor of Mathematics at Rice University, where he advised the mathematician John Morgan. He is a namesake of the Andrews-Curtis conjecture on balanced group presentations, which remains open, and with Gustav Hedlund and Roger Lyndon he proved the Curtis-Hedlund-Lyndon theorem characterizing cellular automata. He wrote two books, Matrix Groups and Abstract Linear Algebra.