Alfred W. Hales

{{infobox scientist

| name = Alfred W. Hales

| birth_name = Alfred Washington Hales

| birth_place = Pasadena, California, U.S.

| birth_date = {{bda |1938|11|30}}

| relatives = R. Stanton Hales (brother)

| fields = Mathematics

| workplaces = University of California, Los Angeles
Institute for Defense Analyses

| nationality = American

| thesis_year = 1962

| thesis_title = On the Nonexistence of Free Complete Boolean Algebras

| doctoral_advisor = Robert P. Dilworth

| alma_mater = California Institute of Technology

| awards = George Pólya Prize (1963)
Fellow of the AAAS (2009)
Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2013)

}}

Alfred Washington Hales (born November 30, 1938) is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the namesakes of the Hales–Jewett theorem. He was born in Pasadena, California, and is the older brother of R. Stanton Hales.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=B687AAAAMAAJ&q=%22Hales,+alfred+washington%22+1938|title = Who's who in Frontier Science and Technology|year = 1984| publisher=Marquis Who's Who |isbn = 9780837957012}}

Professional career

As an undergraduate, Hales was a two-time Putnam Fellow for the California Institute of Technology, in 1958 and 1959.[http://www.maa.org/awards/putnam.html The Mathematical Association of America's William Lowell Putnam Competition], retrieved 2013-01-21. Hales stayed at Caltech for his graduate studies, earning his Ph.D. in 1962 under the supervision of Robert P. Dilworth.{{mathgenealogy|name=Alfred Washington Hales|id=10406}} He is the former chair of the mathematics department at UCLA, and in 2010 became chair of the board of trustees of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA.Al Hales Chairs IPAM Board of Trustees, [http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/news.aspx IPAM News & Announcements] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130118052342/http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/news.aspx |date=2013-01-18 }}, July 15, 2010, retrieved 2013-01-21. From 1992 to 2003, he was director of the IDA Center for Communications Research in La Jolla, California.{{cite journal|last1=Hales|first1=Alfred|title=Sol Golomb--my friend and mentor|journal=Asia Pacific Mathematics Newsletter|pages=30–35|date=December 2017|volume=7|issue=1|url=http://www.asiapacific-mathnews.com/07/0701/0030_0031.pdf|access-date=June 14, 2023}}

Contributions

In 1963, Hales and Jewett published the Hales–Jewett theorem, which is a standard part of Ramsey theory now. They motivated their theorem as a form of game theory: it shows that certain high-dimensional generalizations of tic tac toe cannot have any tied positions.

Hales also contributed to Solomon W. Golomb's highly cited work on shift registers,[http://www.jmargolin.com/sense/refs/ref14_golomb.pdf Shift Register Sequences], Solomon W. Golomb with portions co-authored by Lloyd R. Welch, Richard M. Goldstein, and Alfred W. Hales, Aegean Park Press, 1982. and he has been noted for his work using Ulm invariants to characterize infinite abelian groups.

Awards and honors

In 1971, Hales shared the George Pólya Prize with Ronald Graham, Klaus Leeb, Bruce Lee Rothschild, and Robert I. Jewett, for their work in Ramsey theory.[http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Societies/SIAMPolyaPrize.html The George Pólya Prize], MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, retrieved 2013-01-21. In 2009, Hales was elected a Fellow of the AAAS,[http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/PRN-5-ucla-professors-selected-fellows-149946.aspx 6 UCLA professors named fellows by American Association for the Advancement of Science] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100701175259/http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/PRN-5-ucla-professors-selected-fellows-149946.aspx |date=2010-07-01 }}, Stuart Wolpert, UCLA, December 17, 2009, retrieved 2013-01-21. and in 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[https://www.ams.org/profession/fellows-list List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society], retrieved 2013-01-21.