John G. Thompson
Affiliation
From the Wolf Foundation:
"Professor John G. Thompson’s work has changed the face of finite group theory. Already in his thesis he solved a long-standing conjecture reaching back to work of Frobenius at the turn of the century…He next turned his attention to the classification of the finite simple groups… In the late 1970s he took up McKay´s remarkable observation that there is a connection between the Fischer-Griess group and the modular j-function to formulate a series of conjectures relating modular functions and finite sporadic simple groups. These have now been verified and have led to deep and important questions, which will occupy mathematicians for some time to come. Also during this period he significantly contributed to coding theory and the theory of finite projective planes. The recent solution of the classical problem of the non-existence of a plane of order 10 owes much to his efforts."
"John G. Thompson," Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics
Abel Prize Laureate, 2008
Fields Medalist, 1970