John William Theodore Youngs

John William Theodore Youngs (usually cited as J. W. T. Youngs, known as Ted Youngs; 21 August 1910 Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India – 20 July 1970 Santa Cruz, California) was an American mathematician.

Youngs was the son of a missionary. He completed his undergraduate study at Wheaton College and received his PhD from Ohio State University in 1934 under Tibor Radó. He then taught for 18 years at Indiana University, where for eight years he was chair of the mathematics department. From 1964 he was a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he developed the mathematics faculty and was chair of the academic senate of the university.

Youngs worked in geometric topology, for example, questions on the Frechét-equivalence of topological maps.[1] He is famous for the Ringel–Youngs theorem (i.e. Ringel and Youngs's 1968 proof of the Heawood conjecture),[2] which is closely related to the analogue of the four-color theorem for surfaces of higher genus.

John Youngs was a consultant for Sandia National Laboratories, the Rand Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analyses as well as a trustee for Carver Research Foundation Institute in Tuskegee. In 1946–1947 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. At the University of Santa Cruz a mathematics prize for undergraduates in named after him.

Sources
  • Obituary in Journal of Combinatorial Theory, vol 13, 1972
gollark: I would of course replace the English lesson badness with bringing arbitrary books in to read yourself.
gollark: School but instead of reading random poems you memorise 'life skills' would be quite ae ae ae, as they say.
gollark: If I were to redesign school, it would be much less regimented (you would not be grouped by year etc.), more flexible (an actually sane schedule and more/earlier choice of subjects), and focus on more general skills (not overly specific reading of books, or learning procedures for specific maths things, or that sort of thing). Additionally, more project-based work and more group stuff.
gollark: Those are specific uses of some of those things, yes. Which is why those are important. Although programming isn't intensely mathy and interest is trivial.
gollark: I assume you mean interpersonal? School is really bad for that as it stands because you're artificially segmented into people of ~exactly the same age in a really weird environment.

References
  1. Youngs The representation problem for Frechét Surfaces, Memoirs American Mathematical Society 1951
  2. Ringel, Gerhard; Youngs, J.W.T. (1968). "Solution of the Heawood map-coloring problem". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 60 (2): 438–445. doi:10.1073/pnas.60.2.438. MR 0228378. PMC 225066. PMID 16591648.
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