Contributions to Group Theory (PDF)

This volume grew out of a desire by the editors to honor their teacher, Roger Lyndon, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. Five short articles about Lyndon and his contributions to mathematics, as well as twenty-seven invited research papers in combinatorial group theory and closely related areas are contained in this book. It is a tribute to Lyndon's mathematical breadth that papers covering such a wide array of topics are all closely related to the work he has done. Several of the articles fall into subfields of combinatorial group theory, areas in which much of the initial work was done by Lyndon. Remaining research articles fall into various subfields of homological groups, another area in which he has made major contributions. Research articles, written by some of the leading practitioners in the field, are listed below. There is a biographical essay about Lyndon by Kenneth Appel, and there are expository articles about his work by Saunders Mac Lane, John Ratcliffe, Jerome Keisler, and Paul Schupp. Mac Lane describes the results in Lyndon's doctoral thesis and explains how they fit into the early history of spectral sequences while Ratcliffe presents Lyndon's fundamental work in cohomology of groups in the early part of his career. His work in logic, especially his fundamental results in model theory in the mid 1950s is discussed by Keisler. Lyndon's contribution to group theory over the past twenty years is described by Schupp.