A Balliol Star
In memory of
mathematician
Graham Higman of
Balliol College and
Magdalen College,
Oxford,
Jan. 19, 1917 –
April 8, 2008
From a biography of an earlier Balliol student,
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889):
"In 1867 he won First-Class degrees in Classics
and 'Greats' (a rare 'double-first') and was
considered by Jowett to be the star of Balliol."
Hopkins, a poet who coined the term "inscape," was a member of the Society of Jesus.
According to a biography, Higman was the founder of Oxford's Invariant Society.
From a publication of that society, The Invariant, Issue 15– undated but (according to Issue 16, of 2005) from 1996 (pdf):
|
Taking the square root
of a function by Ian Collier "David Singmaster once gave a talk at the Invariants and afterwards asked this question: What is the square root of the exponential function? In other words, can you define a function f such that for all x, |
Another approach to the expression f(f(x)), by myself in 1982:
For further details,
see Inscapes.
For more about Higman, see an interview in the September 2001 newsletter of the European Mathematical Society (pdf).
of identity: what it is to give
something a name on Monday
and have it respond to
that name on Friday…."