| Birth Date: | July 16, 1937 |
| Birth Place: | Columbus, OH, U.S. |
| Field: | Mathematics |
| Work Institution: | University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma Mater: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology) |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Warren Ambrose |
| Known For: | Krohn–Rhodes theorem |
| Prizes: | National Science Foundation Post-Doc Fellow (1962) |
John Lewis Rhodes is a mathematician known for work in the theory of semigroups, finite state automata, and algebraic approaches to differential equations.[1]
Rhodes was born in Columbus, Ohio, on July 16, 1937, but grew up in Wooster, Ohio, where he founded the Wooster Rocket Society as a teenager. In the fall of 1955, Rhodes entered the 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 the Krohn–Rhodes Theorem.[2] After a year on an NSF fellowship in Paris, France, he became a member of the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent his entire teaching career.
In the late 1960s Rhodes wrote Applications of Automata Theory and Algebra: Via the Mathematical Theory of Complexity to Biology, Physics, Psychology, Philosophy, and Games, informally known as The Wild Book,[3] which quickly became an underground classic, but remained in typescript until its revision and editing by Chrystopher L. Nehaniv in 2009.[4] The following year Springer published his and Benjamin Steinberg's magnum opus, The q-Theory of Finite Semigroups, both a history of the field and the fruit of eight years' development of finite semigroup theory.[5]
In recent years Rhodes brought semigroups into matroid theory. In 2015 he published, with Pedro V. Silva, the results of his current work in another monograph with Springer, Boolean Representations of Simplicial Complexes and Matroids.[6]