James J. Andrews (March 18, 1930 – July 28, 1998) was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Florida State University who specialized in knot theory, topology, and group theory.[1]
Andrews was born March 18, 1930, in Seneca Falls, New York.[1] He did his undergraduate studies at Hofstra College,[1] and earned his doctorate in 1957 from the University of Georgia under the supervision of M. K. Fort, Jr.[2] He worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Georgia, and the University of Washington before joining the FSU faculty in 1961. Andrews was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1963-64.[3] From 1965-67, he looked into cryptology research at the Institute for Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.https://web.archive.org/web/20120819094237/http://www.fsu.edu/~fstime/FS-Times/Volume4/oct98web/5oct98.html He retired in 1994,[1] [4] and died July 28, 1998, in Tallahassee, Florida.[1] [5]
Andrews is known with Morton L. Curtis for the Andrews–Curtis conjecture concerning Nielsen transformations of balanced group presentations.[1] Andrews and Curtis formulated the conjecture in a 1965 paper;[6] it remains open.