Aldridge Knight Bousfield (April 5, 1941 – October 4, 2020),^[1] known as "Pete", was an American mathematician working in algebraic topology, known for the concept of Bousfield localization.

Work and life

Bousfield obtained both his undergraduate degree (1963) and his doctorate (1966) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis, entitled "Higher Order Suspension Maps for Non-Additive Functors", was written under the supervision of Daniel Kan.^[2] He was a lecturer and assistant professor at Brandeis University and moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago where he worked from 1972 to his retirement in 2000.

Bousfield married Marie Vastersavendts, a Belgian mathematician, in 1968. She worked as demographer for the city of Chicago and died in 2016.^[3]

Research

Within algebraic topology, he specialised in homotopy theory. The Bousfield-Kan spectral sequence, Bousfield localization of spectra and model categories, and the Bousfield-Friedlander model structure^[4] are named after Bousfield (and Kan and Friedlander, respectively).

Recognition

He was named to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to homotopy theory and for exposition".^[5]

Selected publications

• Bousfield, Aldridge K.; Kan, Daniel M. (1972), Homotopy limits, completions and localizations, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 304, Springer-Verlag, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-38117-4, ISBN 978-3-540-06105-2
• Bousfield, Aldridge K.; Kan, Daniel M. (1972), "The homotopy spectral sequence of a space with coefficients in a ring", Topology, 11 (1): 79–106, doi:10.1016/0040-9383(72)90024-9
• Bousfield, Aldridge K.; Kan, Daniel M. (1973), "Pairings and products in the homotopy spectral sequence", Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 177: 319–343, doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1973-0372860-2
• Bousfield, Aldridge K. (1977), "Homological Localization Towers for Groups and ${\displaystyle \Pi }$-Modules", Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 10 (186), doi:10.1090/memo/0186, MR 0447375
• Bousfield, Aldridge K.; Friedlander, Eric M. (1978), "Homotopy theory of ${\displaystyle \Gamma }$-spaces, spectra, and bisimplicial sets", Geometric Applications of Homotopy Theory II, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 658, Springer-Verlag, pp. 80–130, doi:10.1007/BFb0068711
• Bousfield, Aldridge K. (1979), "The localization of spectra with respect to homology", Topology, 18 (4): 257–281, doi:10.1016/0040-9383(79)90018-1
• Bousfield, Aldridge K. (1989), "Homotopy Spectral Sequences and Obstructions", Israel Journal of Mathematics, 66 (1–3): 54–104, doi:10.1007/BF02765886

References