John William Scott Cassels (born July 11, 1922) is a leading British mathematician.
His academic career was interrupted in World War II when he was involved in cryptography at Bletchley Park. After the war he became a research student of Louis Mordell, at the University of Cambridge.
He initially worked on elliptic curves. After a period when he worked on geometry of numbers and diophantine approximation, he returned in the later 1950s to the arithmetic of elliptic curves, writing a series of papers connecting the Selmer group with Galois cohomology and laying some of the foundations of the modern theory of infinite descent. His best-known single result may be the proof that the Tate-Shafarevich group , if it is finite, must have order that is a square; the proof being by construction of an alternating form.
His mathematical style is mainly as a problem solver, prepared for example to tackle individual Diophantine equations by algebraic number theory and p-adic methods . His publications number around 200 papers.
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Last updated: 05-30-2005 02:22:34
