Robert Griess

Robert Louis Griess Jr. (born 1945) is an American mathematician who works on finite simple groups and vertex algebras and is the John Griggs Thompson Distinguished University Professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan. He earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1971 with a dissertation on the Schur multipliers of the finite simple groups then known. His work has centred on group extensions, cohomology and Schur multipliers, vertex operator algebras and the classification of finite simple groups. In 1982 he published the first construction of the monster group, the largest sporadic simple group, as rotations of an object in 196,883-dimensional space, which he first called the Friendly Giant. The same paper organised the twenty-six sporadic groups into the Happy Family and the pariahs. He received the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research in 2010 and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.