C. T. C. Wall

Charles Terence Clegg ("Terry") Wall (born 14 December 1936 in Bristol, England) is a leading British mathematician, educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an emeritus professor of the University of Liverpool, where he was first appointed Professor in 1965. From 1978 to 1980 he was the President of the London Mathematical Society.

His early work was in cobordism theory in algebraic topology; this includes his 1959 Cambridge Ph.D thesis entitled "Algebraic aspects of cobordism", written under the direction of Frank Adams and Christopher Zeeman. His research was then mainly in the area of manifolds, particularly geometric topology and related abstract algebra included in surgery theory, of which he was one of the founders. His 1970 research monograph "Surgery on Compact Manifolds" is a major reference work in geometric topology.

His work since the mid 1970's has mostly been in singularity theory as developed by R. Thom, J. Milnor and V. Arnold, and especially concerns the classification of isolated singularities of differentiable maps and of algebraic varieties. He has written two research monographs on singularity theory, "The Geometry of Topological Stability" (1989) (containing a great deal of original work) with Andrew du Plessis, and "Singular Points of Plane Curves" (2004).

His notable students include Andrew Casson and Andrew du Plessis.

Awards

*1965 – Berwick Prize;
*1969 – elected Fellow of the Royal Society;
*1976 – Senior Whitehead Prize;
*1988 – Polya Prize
*1988 – Sylvester Medal
*1990 – elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

External links

*MathGenealogy |id=24418
*MacTutor Biography|id=Wall|Terry
* [http://www.liv.ac.uk/~ctcw/homepage.html His contact details and list of recent publications]
* [http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/surgery Surgery theory]