John Rhodes

Who is John Rhodes?

John Lewis Rhodes is a mathematician known for work in the theory of semigroups, finite state automata, and algebraic approaches to differential equations. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, on July 16, 1937, but moved to Wooster, Ohio, where he founded the Wooster Rocket Society as a teenager. In the fall of 1955, Rhodes entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology intending to major in physics, but he soon switched to mathematics, earning his B.S. in 1960 and his Ph.D. in 1962. His Ph.D. thesis, co-written with a graduate student from Harvard, Kenneth Krohn, became known as the Prime Decomposition Theorem, or more simply Krohn–Rhodes theory. After a year on an NSF fellowship in Paris, France, he became a member of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent his entire teaching career.

In the late 1960s Rhodes wrote The Wild Book, which quickly became an underground classic, but remained in typescript until its revision and editing by Chrystopher L. Nehaniv in 2009.