Hodge, Sir William

Sir William Hodge, in full William Vallance Douglas Hodge, (born June 17, 1903, Edinburgh, Scotland—died July 7, 1975, Cambridge, England), British mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry and his formulation of the Hodge conjecture.

Hodge graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in mathematics in 1923. He went on to further studies in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and in 1926 he became an assistant lecturer in mathematics at the University of Bristol. He received a fellowship to Cambridge in 1930, and in 1931 he was invited to Princeton University for a year, where he worked closely with Solomon Lefschetz on algebraic topology. He returned to Cambridge in 1932 and became Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry in 1936. In 1958 he became master of Pembroke College at Cambridge, and he remained in that position until his retirement in 1970.

In 1941 Hodge formulated in his book Theory and Application of Harmonic Integrals what became known as the Hodge conjecture: that for certain “nice” spaces (projective algebraic varieties), their complicated shapes can be covered (approximated) by a collection of simpler geometric pieces called algebraic cycles. The conjecture received little attention before he presented it in an address during the 1950 International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hodge was knighted in 1959. He helped found the International Mathematical Union in 1951 and was its vice president from 1954 to 1958. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1938, and he was its vice president from 1959 to 1965; he received its Copley Medal in 1974.