The 2008 Abel Prize has been announced. This year’s winners are John Thompson and Jacques Tits.
Thompson is most famous for his work on the Feit-Thompson theorem, that every group of odd order is solvable. Solvable groups resemble upper triangular matrices: a solvable group is constructed in layers out of abelian groups.
Tits invented the notion of BN pairs and buildings. The opposite of a solvable group is a simple group, which cannot be split up into layers. Simple groups tend to resemble the set of all invertible n-by-n matrices over a field (which itself is not simple, but is pretty close to it). Tits identified the key property that makes the resemblence work: the existence of special subgroups B and N. For the group of invertible matrices, B is the set of upper-triangular matrices, while N is the set of permutation matrices. Buildings are a geometric explanation of BN pairs.
Group Theory gets this year’s Abel. Great!!!
How do you pronounce Tits?
I’ve heard his name pronounced “teats”, but that could be wrong.
Chris Hillman
When he came to Yale a few years back, everyone said “tits”. Yeah, just like that.
A concerted effort by all posters on ArsMathematica could probably sell the pronunciation as “teedz” and put a damper on the expectable pre-teen yuk-yukking.
Jacob, there’s a lot more than “Tits” to be hushed up. Three words: Cox-Zucker Theorem.
Worse, though, was when I ran through some very basic quantum cryptography stuff at a CTY summer camp a few years ago, and had to tell actual pre-teens (well, mostly teens) about “bras”. And you know what? When I acknowledged that they were going to giggle, they got it out in a few seconds and we moved on. No big deal.
Besides which, this is a man’s name we’re talking about. How completely rude of you to suggest we just go changing its pronunciation without asking him.
John: Tu ne peux pas t’imaginer à quel point M. Tits se fout de comment on gargouille son nom de famille ici.
I explained a bit more about what Thompson and Tits did in week263 of This Week’s Finds.
I really like Tits very much and I am not afraid to admit it.
But not that other Cox-Zucker Thompson.