William Reynolds
William F. Reynolds was named the William Walker Professor of Mathematics at Tufts University, where he served as scholar, teacher and administrator for over 41 years.
A graduate of Boston Latin School, Reynolds went on to earn his A.B. (summa cum laude) from the College of the Holy Cross; followed by A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, under the direction of Richard Brauer.
After holding the C. L. E. Moore Instructorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Reynolds joined Tufts in 1957 as Assistant Professor. Promoted to Associate Professor in 1960, and Professor in 1967, Reynolds played a crucial role in the establishment and development of Tufts' graduate program in Mathematics.
As a scholar, Reynolds studied the representation theory of finite groups. He has published 24 papers in some of the world's premier Mathematics journals with his most recent paper appearing in the Journal of Algebra in 2019. His study of the relation between blocks in groups and in their subgroups and quotients is fundamental to the field. His work on projective representations (of which the spin representations used in mathematical physics are an example) extended the theory to algebraic number fields. And his explication of the relation between isometries and characters, has influenced the work of peers in the field.