Michael George Aschbacher

Michael G. Aschbacher is the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Aschbacher is 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. It later turned out that the classification was incomplete, because the case of quasithin groups had not been finished. This gap was fixed by Aschbacher and Stephen D. Smith in 2004, in a pair of books comprising about 1300 pages. The classification of finite simple groups is considered one of the crowning achievements of modern mathematics. In 2012 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Aschbacher served as vice president of the AMS from 1996 to 1998.