Colin John Bushnell (1947 – 1 January 2021) was a British mathematician specialising in number theory and representation theory. He spent most of his career at King's College London, 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.

Colin John Bushnell
Born1947 (1947)
DiedJanuary 1, 2021(2021-01-01) (aged 73–74)
Alma materKing's College London
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Institutions
Thesis Representations of 2-graded groups  (1972)
Doctoral advisorAlbrecht Fröhlich

Early life and education

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Bushnell was born in 1947.[1] He studied mathematics at King's College London, where he received his first class honors undergraduate degree and then a Ph.D. in 1972 under the supervision of Albrecht Fröhlich.[2][3]

Career

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From 1972 to 1975, Bushnell was a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[2] He returned to King's College London in 1975 as Lecturer, before being promoted to Reader in 1985 and Professor in 1990.[2] From 1988 to 1989, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study.[4] 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.[2] He retired in 2014.[2] He died on 1 January 2021 at the age of 73.[1]

Bushnell has advised doctoral students including Graham Everest.[3]

Research

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Bushnell's research included "major contributions to the representation theory of reductive p-adic groups and the study of the local Langlands correspondence."[1]

Awards

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In 1994, Bushnell was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich (Smooth representations of p-adic groups: the role of compact open subgroups).[2]

In 1995, Bushnell was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize.[2] In 2002, he became a Fellow of King's College London.[2] He was inaugurated in the 2013 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[2][5]

Selected publications

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  • 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, ISBN 3-540-31486-5 (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

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