Robert Griess

Robert Louis Griess Jr. (born 1945) is an American mathematician working on finite simple groups and vertex algebras. He is currently the John Griggs Thompson Distinguished University Professor of mathematics at University of Michigan.

Education Griess developed a keen interest in mathematics prior to entering undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1963. There, he eventually earned a Ph.D. in 1971 after defending a dissertation on the Schur multipliers of the then-known finite simple groups.

Career Griess' work has focused on group extensions, cohomology and Schur multipliers, as well as on vertex operator algebras and the classification of finite simple groups, with emphasis on constructions of the monster group.

Friendly Giant In 1982, Robert Griess published the first construction of the largest sporadic group, the monster group (or ).

Originally, Griess called the monster group the "Friendly Giant"; Bernd Fischer and Griess independently predicted the existence of the monster group earlier in the decade, by 1973.

By the way, Griess criticized me very strongly for using the term monster for it... I wrote a postcard to Fischer, who is the first discoverer of the Monster, saying something like, "I've been thinking a lot about your monster group"... he liked that name, and ever since then, it's been called the Monster ... Griess made the point — and I... I agree with him in a way — that to call it a monster suggests it's sort of ugly, or frightening, or something; and I wasn't thinking of that at all, I was just thinking of it as being tremendously big. You know, maybe a 'bit sic frightening in a way, but not ugly, really a beautiful thing...

In the same landmark 1982 paper where he published his construction, Griess detailed an organization of the twenty-six sporadic groups into two general families of groups (the Happy Family and the pariahs).

Recognition In 1983 Griess was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw to give a lecture on the sporadic groups and his construction of the monster group, as the largest of these geometric groups. In 2010, he was awarded the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research for his construction of the monster group. In 2020 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2006, Robert Griess has been an editor for Electronic Research Announcements of the AIMS (ERA-AIMS), a peer-review journal.

Selected publications

Books

Journal articles