Person attributes
Academic attributes
Other attributes
John Henry Constantine Whitehead (1904-1960), also known as J. H. C. Whitehead and sometimes referred to as Henry, was a mathematician born in Chennai and a citizen of the United Kingdom. He was educated at Eton College, Balliol College, Oxford, and later at Princeton University. Whitehead was a student of Oswald Veblen and, throughout his career, he advised several doctoral students, including Ioan James, Graham Higman, and Peter Hilton.
He was known for his work in various fields of mathematics, such as CW complex, simple homotopy, crossed module, Whitehead group, Whitehead manifold, and Whitehead product. Some of his notable works include the Whitehead problem, Whitehead torsion, Whitehead theorem, Whitehead manifold, Whitehead link, Spanier-Whitehead duality, Whitehead product, Whitehead's lemma, Whitehead conjecture, and Whitehead's lemma in Lie algebras.
Whitehead received several awards throughout his career, including the Berwick Prize and Fellowship of the Royal Society. He passed away on August 8, 1960, in Princeton, New Jersey.
