A tribute to John Meakin on the occasion of his 75th birthday
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A tribute to John Meakin on the occasion of his 75th birthday Stuart Margolis1 Received: 14 October 2020 / Accepted: 16 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract John Meakin has had a distinguished career of over half a century in the theory of semigroups. This article gives a synopsis of his most important contributions. The author, a long time collaborator, gives his personal memories of working with John and the influence he has had on his career.
John Meakin John Meakin was born on March 13, 1946 in Brisbane, Australia. He received his B. Sc. from the University of Queensland in 1968 and his Ph.D. at the age of 23 at Monash University under the direction of G.B. Preston. During Academic Year 1969–1970 he held a Post Doctoral position at the University of Florida. John thought of returning to Australia and because of the different academic calendars Communicated by Lászlo Márki. * Stuart Margolis [email protected] 1
Department of Mathematics, Bar Ilan University, 52900 Ramat Gan, Israel
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decided to take a one-semester Visiting Professorship at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Apparently Nebraska liked John and John liked Nebraska as he spent 89 additional semesters at UNL, retiring in 2015 as the Milton Mohr Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, a position that he held from 1987–2015. John was Chair of the Department of Mathematics from 2003–2011. During his career, John was a visitor at a number of Universities and Institutions. Particularly important to his early research was a visit to the University of Kerala in 1977–1978, where he worked with Nambooripad on the then new theory of biordered sets and inductive groupoids and a visit to Rijksuniversiteit Gent in 1983–1984, where he worked with Pastijn on the four-spiral semigroup and related issues. I will describe these later in the paper. Among other institutions that John visited and where significant results followed were The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, Université de Paris VI, Università di Siena, Politecnico di Milano and Xi’an Jiaotong University. John mentored 17 Ph.D. students many of whom have had distinguished careers of their own. He has published 75 articles and given more than 200 invited seminars, colloquia and conference talks in some 30 different countries. He was an Editor for the International Journal of Algebra and Computation from 1990–2020, serving as a Managing Editor from 1990–2010. John served on a number of committees of the American Mathematical Society and was an organizer or member of the scientific advisory committee for some 20 international conferences. John’s prolific research career breaks into four distinct but related areas. I will now give a historical summary of each phase of John’s work in the rest of the paper.
1 Thesis and the early 1970s At the time of John’s thesis, the school of semigroup theory in Monash was interested in generalizing results from the theory of inverse semigroups to more cl
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