Roger Lyndon

Roger Conant Lyndon was an American mathematician, for many years a professor at the University of Michigan, known for Lyndon words, the Curtis-Hedlund-Lyndon theorem, Craig-Lyndon interpolation and the Lyndon-Hochschild-Serre spectral sequence. He was born on December 18, 1917 in Calais, Maine, graduated from Harvard University in 1939 and received his doctorate there in 1946 under Saunders Mac Lane. His thesis concerned group cohomology, and the spectral sequence that came out of that work relates a group's cohomology to the cohomologies of its normal subgroups and their quotient groups. After working at the Office of Naval Research and at Princeton University he moved to the University of Michigan in 1953, where his notable doctoral students included Kenneth Appel and Joseph Kruskal. He died on June 8, 1988.