Education
Lyons received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1970 at the University of Chicago under John Griggs Thompson with a thesis entitled Characterizations of Some Finite Simple Groups with Small 2-Rank.
mathematician university professor
Lyons received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1970 at the University of Chicago under John Griggs Thompson with a thesis entitled Characterizations of Some Finite Simple Groups with Small 2-Rank.
Since 1972 he has been a professor at Rutgers University. With Daniel Gorenstein and Ronald Solomon he wrote a six volume series on the classification program for finite simple groups, a program in which the three of them were major participants. He discovered a sporadic group which Charles Sims constructed and called the Lyons group Ly.
In 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to the classification of the finite simple groups, including the discovery of one of the 26 sporadic finite simple groups.".