John R. Stallings - Biographical Data

Biographical Data

John Stallings was born on July 22, 1935 in Morrilton, Arkansas.

Stallings received his B.Sc. from University of Arkansas in 1956 (where he was one of the first two graduates in the university's Honors program) and he received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1959 under the direction of Ralph Fox.

After completing his PhD, Stallings held a number of postdoctoral and faculty positions, including being an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University as well as and instructorship and a faculty appointment at Princeton. Stallings joined the University of California at Berkeley as a faculty member in 1967 where he remained until his retirement in 1994. Even after his retirement, Stallings continued supervising UC Berkeley graduate students until 2005. Stallings was an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellow from 1962–65 and a Miller Institute fellow from 1972-73. Over the course of his career, Stallings had 22 doctoral students and 60 doctoral descendants. He published over 50 papers, predominantly in the areas of geometric group theory and the topology of 3-manifolds.

Stallings delivered an invited address as the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice in 1970 and a James K. Whittemore Lecture at Yale University in 1969.

Stallings received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra from the American Mathematical Society in 1970.

The conference "Geometric and Topological Aspects of Group Theory", held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley in May 2000, was dedicated to the 65th birthday of Stallings. In 2002 a special issue of the journal Geometriae Dedicata was dedicated to Stallings on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Stallings died from prostate cancer on November 24, 2008.