Leonard Soicher

Leonard Soicher
Soicher in May 2026
Born1955 (age 70–71)
Canada
Education
Scientific career
Fields
WorkplacesQueen Mary University of London
John H. Conway
Websitewebspace.maths.qmul.ac.uk/l.h.soicher

Leonard Hyman Soicher is a British-Canadian mathematician who worked in algebraic graph theory, group theory, combinatorial design theory, and discrete computational mathematics. He is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London.[1]

Education

Soicher earned a BSc in mathematics in 1978 and a Master of Computer Science in 1981,[2] both from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His master's thesis, titled “The Computation of Galois groups”, was supervised by John McKay.[2] He won a Commonwealth Scholarship[3] to pursue a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, with John H. Conway as his supervisor.[4] Soicher was awarded his PhD in 1985, with a PhD thesis titled “Presentations of Some Finite Groups”[3] that focused on sporadic simple groups.

Career

Soicher has worked across a range of fields as a professional pure mathematician. After his doctorate, he worked again with John McKay as a postdoc at Concordia University in Canada.[5] He then joined Queen Mary University of London in 1987, where he remained until retirement in 2018, becoming a Professor in 2007.[6]

Soicher is most known for his early work on presentations of sporadic simple groups; his contribution to the ATLAS of Finite Groups; the Bimonster group; work with Charles Leedham-Green developing “collection from the left”[7] and the product replacement algorithm.[8][9] in computational group theory; his research on distance-regular graphs (especially the three so-called Soicher graphs[10][11] and the Moscow-Soicher graph[12][13]); and his long-term and ongoing authorship and development of the GRAPE package[14] for GAP. Soicher is also a co-creator and maintainer of the website designtheory.org.

Soicher has co-published with notable mathematicians, including Peter Cameron, John Conway, Simon P. Norton, Cheryl Praeger, and Sarah Rees[15]

GAP

Soicher has been a member of the council of the computer algebra system GAP since June 1997, and was its chair from March 2009 until September 2021.[16] He is the author of the GRAPE[17] and DESIGN[18] packages for GAP. A special session in honour of Soicher's 70th birthday was held at the GAP Days Summer 2025 workshop in Koper, Slovenia.[19]

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ https://www.qmul.ac.uk/maths/profiles/soicherlh.html
  2. 1 2 https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item?id=TC-QMG-4916&op=pdf&app=Library&oclc_number=1033219418
  3. 1 2 Soicher, Leonard (2024). Presentations of Some Finite Groups (Thesis). Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository. doi:10.17863/CAM.110463.
  4. ↑ "Leonard Soicher - the Mathematics Genealogy Project".
  5. ↑ LMS Newsletter, Issue 503, November 2022, Pages 44–45. https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/default/files/inline-files/NLMS_503_for%20web_0.pdf
  6. ↑ https://www.qmul.ac.uk/maths/news-and-events/news-/items/professor-leonard-soicher-inaugural-lecture.html
  7. ↑ Collection from the left and other strategies, C.R. Leedham-Green, L.H. Soicher, Journal of Symbolic Computation, Volume 9, Issues 5–6, 1990, Pages 665-675, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0747-7171(08)80081-8
  8. ↑ The product replacement algorithm is polynomial, Igor Pak, Proc. FOCS 2000, 41st Annual Symposium, 476-485, https://www.math.ucla.edu/~pak/papers/PRfocs6.pdf
  9. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20040911211017/http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/390703.html
  10. ↑ "Soicher Graphs".
  11. ↑ Three New Distance-regular Graphs, Leonard H. Soicher, European Journal of Combinatorics, Volume 14, Issue 5, 1993, Pages 501-505, https://doi.org/10.1006/eujc.1993.1052.
  12. ↑ "Moscow-Soicher Graph".
  13. ↑ Yet Another Distance Regular Graph Related to a Golay Code, Leonard H. Soicher, The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1995, https://doi.org/10.37236/1220
  14. ↑ "GAP package GRAPE".
  15. ↑ "Google Scholar".
  16. ↑ "Council".
  17. ↑ "GAP package GRAPE".
  18. ↑ "GAP package DESIGN".
  19. ↑ "Program · GAP Days Summer 2025".
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