William Boone (mathematician)

William Werner Boone (16 January 1920 in Cincinnati – 14 September 1983 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American mathematician. He completed his undergrad degree as a part time student at the University of Cincinnati.^[1]

William Werner Boone
William W. Boone and Eileen Boone at Altgeld Hall, University of Illinois, 1979
Born	(1920-01-16)January 16, 1920 Cincinnati, Ohio
Died	September 14, 1983(1983-09-14) (aged 63) Urbana, Illinois
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University
Known for	Boone–Higman theorem Boone–Rogers theorem Novikov–Boone theorem
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Institute for Advanced Study
Doctoral advisor	Alonzo Church

Alonzo Church was his Ph.D. advisor at Princeton, and Kurt Gödel was his friend at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Pyotr Novikov showed in 1955 that there exists a finitely presented group G such that the word problem for G is undecidable.^[2] A different proof was obtained by Boone in a paper published in 1958.^[3]

Selected publications

• W. W. Boone, Decision problems about algebraic and logical systems as a whole and recursively enumerable degrees of unsolvability. 1968 Contributions to Math. Logic (Colloquium, Hannover, 1966), North-Holland, Amsterdam.
• W. W. Boone, Roger Lyndon, Frank Cannonito, Word Problems: Decision Problem in Group Theory, North-Holland, 1973.