Michael Aschbacher

Michael George Aschbacher is an American mathematician, born on April 8, 1944, best known for his work on finite groups. He was a leading figure in the completion of the classification of finite simple groups in the 1970s and 1980s. The classification later turned out to be incomplete because the case of quasithin groups had not been finished, and Aschbacher and Stephen D. Smith fixed this gap in 2004 in a pair of books of about 1300 pages. He received his B.S. at the California Institute of Technology in 1966 and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969, joined the Caltech faculty in 1970 and became a full professor in 1976, and he is the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics there. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, won the Cole Prize in 1980, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1990 and received the Rolf Schock Prize for Mathematics in 2011.