Roger Lyndon

Roger Conant Lyndon (December 18, 1917 – June 8, 1988) was an American mathematician, for many years a professor at the University of Michigan.

After a brief teaching stint at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he returned to Harvard for the third time in 1942 and while there taught navigation as part of the V-12 Navy College Training Program while earning his Ph.D.[1] He received his doctorate in 1946 under the supervision of Saunders Mac Lane.

[1] At Michigan, he shared an office with Donald G. Higman;[3] his notable doctoral students there included Kenneth Appel and Joseph Kruskal.

[4] Lyndon was credited by Gustav A. Hedlund for his role in the discovery of the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem, a mathematical characterization of cellular automata in terms of continuous equivariant functions on shift spaces.

[1] The book Contributions to Group Theory (American Mathematical Society, 1984, ISBN 978-0-8218-5035-0) is a festschrift dedicated to Lyndon on the occasion of his 65th birthday; it includes five articles about Lyndon and his mathematical research, as well as 27 invited and refereed research articles.