Date: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 Time: 4:00 p.m. Room: 121 Little Hall Opening Remarks by John G. Thompson Graduate Research Professor Tea: 3:30 p.m. in The Atrium (LIT 339)

Abstract: Classification of algebraic structures began in earnest in the late 1880's. I shall outline the history of the simple group classification from the pioneering work of Holder, Frobenius and Burnside to its recent completion by Aschbacher and Smith.

Ronald Solomon is Professor of Mathematics at the Ohio State University. He received his PhD in 1971 at Yale University under the supervision of Walter Feit. He contributed to numerous aspects of the Classification Project during the 1970's and early 1980's, principally to the proof of Thompson's B-Conjecture and the classification of simple groups of component type (especially the alternating groups). Beginning in 1982, he became part of a team with Danny Gorenstein and Richard Lyons devoted to the project of preparing a revised and largely self-contained proof of the Classification Theorem. This ongoing project has led to five published volumes so far, with a sixth near completion, and a total of eleven anticipated. Since 1975, he has been on the faculty of the Ohio State University, with visiting appointments at Oxford University and Rutgers University.

The Special Year in Algebra website is http://www.math.ufl.edu/~sin/ufalgyr/index.html