Morton Landers Curtis (November 11, 1921 – February 4, 1989)[1] was an American mathematician, an expert on group theory and the W. L. Moody, Jr.
Subsequently, he taught mathematics at Florida State University before moving to Rice.
[4] Curtis is, with James J. Andrews, the namesake of the Andrews–Curtis conjecture concerning Nielsen transformations of balanced group presentations.
Andrews and Curtis formulated the conjecture in a 1965 paper;[5] it remains open.
Together with Gustav A. Hedlund and Roger Lyndon, he proved the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem characterizing cellular automata as being defined by continuous equivariant functions on a shift space.