James J. Andrews

James J. Andrews (born March 18, 1930, in Seneca Falls, New York; died July 28, 1998, in Tallahassee, Florida) was an American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics at Florida State University. Andrews specialized in knot theory, topology, and group theory. He completed his undergraduate studies at Hofstra College and received his doctorate in 1957 from the University of Georgia under the guidance of M. K. Fort, Jr. His career included work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Georgia, and the University of Washington before he joined the faculty at Florida State University in 1961. Andrews was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study during 1963–64. From 1965 to 1967, he was involved in cryptology research at the Institute for Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He retired in 1994. Andrews is recognized, along with Morton L. Curtis, for the Andrews–Curtis conjecture, which relates to Nielsen transformations of balanced group presentations. They introduced this conjecture in a 1965 paper, and it remains an open problem.