John Henry Whitehead Biography

John Henry Constantine Whitehead (known commonly as Henry Whitehead), had a large influence on the development of homotopy theory, which is based on a certain kind of mapping of topological spaces. With Oswald Veblen, he also wrote the classic Foundations of Differential Geometry. He was the nephew of mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

The son of a bishop, Whitehead was born in Madras, India on November 11, 1904. When he was about 18 months old, his parents took him to England and left him with his grandmother in Oxford before returning quickly to India. He would see virtually nothing of his parents until his father retired in 1920 or 1922 and moved back to England. Thus, he was raised primarily by his grandmother, who enrolled him in the local schools, where he did well both in his classes and at sports--especially boxing and cricket. He entered the prestigious school at Eton and began specializing in mathematics. Whitehead never seemed to be a brilliant student, perhaps because of the many other interests that distracted him and sadness over the long separation from his parents.

Nevertheless, he did sufficiently well at school to win a scholarship to Baliol College at Oxford University in 1923. There he also devoted most of his academic energy to mathematics, although he remained distracted by the wide range of nonacademic pursuits available to him, including sports and poker. Thus, when he graduated in 1927, Whitehead decided he was not fit for an academic career, despite earning high honors. He chose instead to join a stock brokerage. Meanwhile, he lived with his parents in Berkshire and commuted to the London firm.

After only a year, however, Whitehead realized he had made a mistake. He returned to Oxford University, where he soon attended a lecture by Veblen on differential geometry. He decided to dedicate himself to research on this topic, and quickly won a fellowship to work toward his doctorate at Princeton University in the United States. He arrived there in 1929. By the end of his three-year period there, Whitehead had become more interested in topology. He received his doctorate in 1932 after writing a thesis on representation of projective spaces, and the same year published The Foundations of Differential Geometry, which contains the first accepted definition of a differentiable manifold, with Veblen.

After returning to Oxford in 1933, Whitehead received a fellowship at Balliol College. Two years later, he published another pioneering work on differential geometry called On the Covering of a Complete Space by the Geodesics through a Point. He continued his study of manifolds and also established a school of topology at Oxford. When World War II began, however, Whitehead began dedicating much of his time and energy to helping Jews escape from Europe, even inviting some of them to stay in his home. He left Oxford in 1940 to do war work in London, including jobs at the foreign office and the Board of Trade, but returned to his home in Oxford when the war ended in 1945.

In 1947, Whitehead resumed his academic career when he accepted the chair of pure mathematics at Oxford University. During the 1950s, he wrote many papers with other mathematicians, indicating his eagerness to share his ideas and learn the results of others. When his mother died in 1953, he inherited a small farm and some cattle, so he and his wife (married in 1934) bought another farm nearby, moved in, and ran it as an active operation. He lived there until his death from a heart attack on May 8, 1960 while visiting Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study. Many believed that he died at the height of his intellectual powers. Whitehead and his wife, a concert pianist whom he married in 1934, had two sons.