Colin John Bushnell (1947 – 1 January 2021) was a British mathematician specialising in

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic function, integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777� ...

and representation theory. He spent most of his career at

King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's ...

, including a stint as the head of the School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, and made several contributions to the representation theory of reductive ''p''-adic groups and the local Langlands correspondence.

Early life and education

Bushnell was born in 1947. He studied mathematics at

, where he received his first class honors undergraduate degree and then a Ph.D. in 1972 under the supervision of Albrecht Fröhlich.

Career

From 1972 to 1975, Bushnell was a lecturer at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

. He returned to King's College London in 1975 as Lecturer, before being promoted to Reader in 1985 and Professor in 1990. From 1988 to 1989, he was a member of the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

. From 1996 to 1997, he was a chairman of the mathematics department and from 1997 to 2004 he was the head of the School of Physical Sciences and Engineering. He retired in 2014. He died on 1 January 2021 at the age of 73. Bushnell has advised doctoral students including

Graham Everest Graham Robert Everest (14 December 1957 in Southwick, West Sussex – 30 July 2010) was a British mathematician working on arithmetic dynamics and Recurrence relation, recursive equations in number theory. Life Everest studied at Bedford College ...

Research

Bushnell's research included "major contributions to the representation theory of reductive ''p''-adic groups and the study of the local Langlands correspondence."

Awards

In 1994, Bushnell was an

invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians This is a list of International Congresses of Mathematicians Plenary and Invited Speakers. Being invited to talk at an International Congress of Mathematicians has been called "the equivalent, in this community, of an induction to a hall of fame." ...

in Zurich (''Smooth representations of p-adic groups: the role of compact open subgroups''). In 1995, Bushnell was awarded the

Senior Whitehead Prize The Senior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) is now awarded in odd numbered years in memory of John Henry Constantine Whitehead, president of the LMS between 1953 and 1955. The Prize is awarded to mathematicians normally ...

. In 2002, he became a Fellow of King's College London. He was inaugurated in the 2013 class of Fellows of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

Selected publications

*With Albrecht Fröhlich, ''Gauss sums and p-adic division algebras,'' lecture notes in mathematics, vol. 987, Springer Verlag 1983 *With Guy Henniart, ''The local Langlands conjecture for GL(2),'' Springer-Verlag, 2006, (Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften 335) *With Philip Kutzko, ''The admissible dual of GL(N) via compact open subgroups,'' Annals of Mathematical Studies 129, Princeton University Press 1993

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Bushnell, Colin 1947 births Alumni of King's College London 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of King's College London 2021 deaths University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty