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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#10351

Arnold Dresden

1882 - 1954 (72 years)

Arnold Dresden was a Dutch-American mathematician, known for his work in the calculus of variations and collegiate mathematics education. He was a president of the Mathematical Association of America and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

#10352

Zdeněk Frolík

1933 - 1989 (56 years)

Zdeněk Frolík was a Czech mathematician. His research interests included topology and functional analysis. In particular, his work concerned covering properties of topological spaces, ultrafilters, homogeneity, measures, uniform spaces. He was one of the founders of modern descriptive theory of sets and spaces.

#10353

Billy James Pettis

1913 - 1979 (66 years)

Billy James Pettis , was an American mathematician, known for his contributions to functional analysis. See also Dunford–Pettis propertyDunford–Pettis theoremMilman–Pettis theoremOrlicz–Pettis theoremPettis integralPettis theorem

#10354

Arthur Rosenthal

Arthur Rosenthal

1887 - 1959 (72 years)

Arthur Rosenthal was a German mathematician. Career Rosenthal's mathematical studies started in 1905 in Munich, under Ferdinand Lindemann and Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich and the Technical University Munich, as well as at the University of Göttingen. After submitting his thesis on regular polyhedra in 1909, he was promoted to assistant at the Technical University in 1911 and then associate professor in the University of Munich in 1920. The following year he was appointed associate professor in the University of Heidelberg, with a promotion to full professor in 1930. Between 1...

#10355

Roman Sikorski

1920 - 1983 (63 years)

Roman Sikorski was a Polish mathematician. Biography Sikorski was a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1952 until 1982. Since 1962, he was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Sikorski's research interests included: Boolean algebrass, mathematical logic, functional analysis, the theory of distributions, measure theory, general topology, and descriptive set theory.

#10356

Arthur Sard

1909 - 1980 (71 years)

Arthur Sard was an American mathematician, famous for his work in differential topology and in spline interpolation. His fame stems primarily from Sard's theorem, which says that the set of critical valuess of a differential function which has sufficiently many derivatives has measure zero.

#10357

Michael Fekete

1886 - 1957 (71 years)

Michael Fekete was a Hungarian-Israeli mathematician. Biography Fekete was born in 1886 in Zenta, Austria-Hungary . He received his PhD in 1909 from the University of Budapest , under the stewardship of Lipót Fejér, among whose students were other mathematicians such as Paul Erdős, John von Neumann, Pál Turán and George Pólya. After completing his PhD he left to University of Göttingen, which in those days was considered a mathematics hub, in 1914 he returned to the University of Budapest, where he attained the title of Privatdozent.

#10358

Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet

1903 - 1984 (81 years)

Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet was a British mathematician who worked in analysis, especially Fourier series. His daughter, Rosamund Caroline Bosanquet was a British cellist, music teacher and composer.

#10359

Emmy Noether

1882 - 1935 (53 years)

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

#10360

Charles Fox

1897 - 1977 (80 years)

Charles Fox was the English mathematician who introduced the Fox–Wright function and the Fox H-function. In 1976, he received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University. External links http://www.materialtexts.bbk.ac.uk/?p=343Charles Fox at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive

#10361

Rózsa Péter

1905 - 1977 (72 years)

Rózsa Péter, born Rózsa Politzer, was a Hungarian mathematician and logician. She is best known as the "founding mother of recursion theory". Early life and education Péter was born in Budapest, Hungary, as Rózsa Politzer . She attended Pázmány Péter University , originally studying chemistry but later switching to mathematics. She attended lectures by Lipót Fejér and József Kürschák. While at university, she met László Kalmár; they would collaborate in future years and Kalmár encouraged her to pursue her love of mathematics.

#10362

Percy John Daniell

Percy John Daniell

1889 - 1946 (57 years)

Percy John Daniell was a pure and applied mathematician. Early life and education Daniell was born in Valparaiso, Chile. His family returned to England in 1895. Daniell attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge . At this time Daniell was an applied mathematician/theoretical physicist.

#10363

Theodore William Chaundy

1889 - 1966 (77 years)

Theodore William Chaundy was an English mathematician who introduced Burchnall–Chaundy theory. Chaundy was born to widowed businessman John Chaundy and his second wife Sarah Pates in their shop-cum-home at 49 Broad Street in Oxford. John had eight children, one of whom died as a toddler, with his late first wife and died barely a year after Chaundy was born. The Chaundy home along Broad Street has since been demolished.

#10364

Samuel Newby Curle

1930 - 1989 (59 years)

Samuel Newby Curle FRSE was a British mathematician. He served as Professor of Applied Mathematics at St Andrews University from 1967 until 1989. St Andrews University created the Curle Lecture in his memory.

#10365

Shirley Jackson Case

Shirley Jackson Case

1872 - 1947 (75 years)

Shirley Jackson Case was an historian of early Christianity, and a liberal theologian. He served as dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Biography Case was born on September 28, 1872, in Hatfield Point, New Brunswick. He received a BA and MA in mathematics from Acadia University. He taught mathematics at the New Hampton Library Institute. In 1904, he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1908. He was professor of New Testament literature and interpretation at University of Chicago Divinity School until 1925.

#10366

Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr.

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr. was an American mathematician, and professor at Washington University in St. Louis working on analysis. Life Hirschman earned his Ph.D. in 1947 from Harvard under David Widder. After writing ten papers together, Hirschman and Widder published a book entitled The Convolution Transform. Hirschman spent most of his career at Washington University, where he published mainly in harmonic analysis and operator theory. Washington University holds a lecture series given by Hirschman, with one lecture given by Richard Askey. While Askey was at Washington University, Hirschman asked him to solve an ultraspherical polynomial problem.

#10367

Joseph Wedderburn

Joseph Wedderburn

1882 - 1948 (66 years)

Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn FRSE FRS was a Scottish mathematician, who taught at Princeton University for most of his career. A significant algebraist, he proved that a finite division algebra is a field, and part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras. He also worked on group theory and matrix algebra.

#10368

Charles Ehresmann

Charles Ehresmann

1905 - 1979 (74 years)

Charles Ehresmann was a German-born French mathematician who worked in differential topology and category theory. He was an early member of the Bourbaki group, and is known for his work on the differential geometry of smooth fiber bundles, notably the introduction of the concepts of Ehresmann connection and of jet bundles, and for his seminar on category theory.

#10369

John Myhill

1923 - 1987 (64 years)

John R. Myhill Sr. was a British mathematician. Education Myhill received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Willard Van Orman Quine in 1949. He was professor at SUNY Buffalo from 1966 until his death in 1987. He also taught at several other universities.

#10370

Joseph Slepian

1891 - 1969 (78 years)

Joseph Slepian was an American electrical engineer known for his contributions to the developments of electrical apparatus and theory. Born in Boston, MA of Jewish Russian immigrants, he studied mathematics at Harvard University, from which he was awarded a B.Sc. , a M.Sc. and Ph.D. on the thesis On the Functions of a Complex Variable Defined by an Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order and First Degree advised by George Birkhoff . Meanwhile, he also worked at Boston Elevated Railway.

#10371

Wladimir Seidel

1907 - 1981 (74 years)

Wladimir P. Seidel was a Russian-born German-American mathematician, and Doctor of Mathematics. He held a fellowship as a Benjamin Peirce Professor in Harvard University. During World War II, he was with the Montreal Theory group for the National Research Council of Canada.

#10372

Stefan E. Warschawski

1904 - 1989 (85 years)

Stefan Emanuel "Steve" Warschawski was a mathematician, a professor and department chair at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of California, San Diego.

#10373

Cyrus Colton MacDuffee

1895 - 1961 (66 years)

Cyrus Colton MacDuffee from Oneida, New York was a professor of mathematics at University of Wisconsin. He wrote a number of influential research papers in abstract algebra. MacDuffee served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society , was editor of the Transactions of the A.M.S., and served as president of the Mathematical Association of America .

#10374

Ivan S. Sokolnikoff

1901 - 1976 (75 years)

Ivan Stephan Sokolnikoff was a Russian-American applied mathematician, who specialized in elasticity theory and wrote several mathematical textbooks for engineers and physicists. Biography Born to a wealthy family in Tsarist Russia, Ivan Sokolnikoff was educated by private tutors and at Anders Classical Gymnasium in Kiev. During the Russian Revolution, as a Tsarist naval officer, he was wounded in combat off the Kuril Islands. With the victory of the Reds, he became a refugee in China. There he worked for a subsidiary of an American electrical firm until 1922 when he became an American immigrant in Seattle.

#10375

Charles Loewner

Charles Loewner

1893 - 1968 (75 years)

Charles Loewner was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German. Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prague, where his father Sigmund Löwner was a store owner.

#10376

Heinrich Behnke

Heinrich Behnke

1898 - 1979 (81 years)

Heinrich Adolph Louis Behnke was a German mathematician and rector at the University of Münster. Life and career He was born into a Lutheran family in Horn, a suburb of Hamburg. He attended the University of Göttingen and submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Hamburg. He was noted for work on complex analysis with Henri Cartan and Peter Thullen. His first wife, Aenne Albersheim, was Jewish, but she died soon after the birth of their son. He was concerned about his son's ethnicity during the Nazi period. In 1936 he was elected a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Le...

#10377

Erich Hecke

1887 - 1947 (60 years)

Erich Hecke was a German mathematician known for his work in number theory and the theory of modular forms. Biography Hecke was born in Buk, Province of Posen, German Empire . He obtained his doctorate in Göttingen under the supervision of David Hilbert.

#10378

Paola Sebastiani

Paola Sebastiani is a biostatistician and a professor at Boston University working in the field of genetic epidemiology, building prognostic models that can be used for the dissection of complex traits. Her research interests include Bayesian modeling of biomedical data, particularly genetic and genomic data.

#10379

Anthony Morse

1911 - 1984 (73 years)

Anthony Perry Morse was an American mathematician who worked in both analysis, especially measure theory, and in the foundations of mathematics. He is best known as the co-creator, together with John L. Kelley, of Morse–Kelley set theory. This theory first appeared in print in Kelley's General Topology. Morse's own version appeared later in A Theory of Sets.

#10380

Ernst Hölder

1901 - 1990 (89 years)

Ernst Otto Hölder was a German mathematician who made contributions to partial differential equations and continuum mechanics. Education and career Hölder was born in Leipzig and studied at the University of Leipzig, where he earned his PhD in 1926 with a dissertation on fluid dynamics. Afterwards, he worked as an assistant at the University of Leipzig and passed the First State Examination in 1926. In 1929, he earned his habilitation, also at the University of Leipzig, with a topic on celestial mechanics. From 1929 to 1939, he worked as a privatdozent at the University of Leipzig, and from 1...

#10381

Werner Fenchel

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Moritz Werner Fenchel was a mathematician known for his contributions to geometry and to optimization theory. Fenchel established the basic results of convex analysis and nonlinear optimization theory which would, in time, serve as the foundation for nonlinear programming. A German-born Jew and early refugee from Nazi suppression of intellectuals, Fenchel lived most of his life in Denmark. Fenchel's monographs and lecture notes are considered influential.

#10382

Banesh Hoffmann

Banesh Hoffmann

1906 - 1986 (80 years)

Banesh Hoffmann was a British mathematician and physicist known for his association with Albert Einstein. Life Banesh Hoffmann was born in Richmond, Surrey, on 6 September 1906. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to earn his doctorate at Princeton University.

#10383

Allen Shields

1927 - 1989 (62 years)

Allen Lowell Shields was an American mathematician who worked on measure theory, complex analysis, functional analysis and operator theory, and was "one of the world's leading authorities on spaces of analytic functions."

#10384

Philip Franklin

1898 - 1965 (67 years)

Philip Franklin was an American mathematician and professor whose work was primarily focused in analysis. Dr. Franklin received a B.S. in 1918 from City College of New York . He received his M.A. in 1920 and Ph.D. in 1921 both from Princeton University. His dissertation, The Four Color Problem, was supervised by Oswald Veblen. After teaching for one year at Princeton and two years at Harvard University , Franklin joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Mathematics, where he stayed until his 1964 retirement.

#10385

Dunham Jackson

1888 - 1946 (58 years)

Dunham Jackson was a mathematician who worked within approximation theory, notably with trigonometrical and orthogonal polynomials. He is known for Jackson's inequality. He was awarded the Chauvenet Prize in 1935. His book Fourier Series and Orthogonal Polynomials was reprinted in 2004.

#10386

Melvin R. Novick

1932 - 1986 (54 years)

Melvin R. Novick was an American statistician. He was a professor of Statistics at the University of Iowa, and a consultant for the Educational Testing Service . Books

#10387

Rolf Nevanlinna

Rolf Nevanlinna

1895 - 1980 (85 years)

Rolf Herman Nevanlinna was a Finnish mathematician who made significant contributions to complex analysis. Background Nevanlinna was born Rolf Herman Neovius, becoming Nevanlinna in 1906 when his father changed the family name.

#10388

George Forsythe

1917 - 1972 (55 years)

George Elmer Forsythe was an American computer scientist and numerical analyst who founded and led Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Forsythe is often credited with coining the term "computer science" and is recognized as a founding figure in the field.

#10389

Irvin Cohen

1917 - 1955 (38 years)

Irvin Sol Cohen was an American mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on local rings. He was a student of Oscar Zariski at Johns Hopkins University. In his thesis he proved the Cohen structure theorem for complete Noetherian local rings. In 1946 he proved the unmixedness theorem for power series rings. As a result, Cohen–Macaulay rings are named after him and Francis Sowerby Macaulay.

#10390

Abraham Robinson

Abraham Robinson

1918 - 1974 (56 years)

Abraham Robinson was a mathematician who is most widely known for development of nonstandard analysis, a mathematically rigorous system whereby infinitesimal and infinite numbers were reincorporated into modern mathematics. Nearly half of Robinson's papers were in applied mathematics rather than in pure mathematics.

#10391

Irving Reiner

1924 - 1986 (62 years)

Irving Reiner was a mathematician at the University of Illinois who worked on representation theory. He solved the problem of finding which abelian groups have a finite number of indecomposable modules. His book with Charles W. Curtis, , was for many years the standard text on representation theory.

#10392

Kenneth O. May

1915 - 1977 (62 years)

Kenneth O. May was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who developed May's theorem. May was a prime mover behind the International Commission on the History of Mathematics, and was the first editor of its journal Historia Mathematica. Every four years the ICHM awards the Kenneth O. May Prize for outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics.

#10393

Ludwig Bieberbach

Ludwig Bieberbach

1886 - 1982 (96 years)

Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach was a German mathematician and Nazi. Biography Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, he studied at Heidelberg and under Felix Klein at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate in 1910. His dissertation was titled On the theory of automorphic functions . He began working as a Privatdozent at Königsberg in 1910 and as Professor ordinarius at the University of Basel in 1913. He taught at the University of Frankfurt in 1915 and the University of Berlin from 1921–45.

#10394

Friedrich Karl Schmidt

Friedrich Karl Schmidt

1901 - 1977 (76 years)

Friedrich Karl Schmidt was a German mathematician, who made notable contributions to algebra and number theory. Schmidt studied from 1920 to 1925 in Freiburg and Marburg. In 1925 he completed his doctorate at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg under the direction of Alfred Loewy. In 1927 he became a Privatdozent at the University of Erlangen, where he received his habilitation and in 1933 became a professor extraordinarius. In 1933/34 he was a Dozent at the University of Göttingen, where he worked with Helmut Hasse. Schmidt was then a professor ordinarius at the University of Jena from 1934 to 1945.

#10395

Edward J. McShane

1904 - 1989 (85 years)

Edward James McShane was an American mathematician noted for his advancements of the calculus of variations, integration theory, stochastic calculus, and exterior ballistics. His name is associated with the McShane–Whitney extension theorem and McShane integral. McShane was professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia, president of the American Mathematical Society, president of the Mathematical Association of America, a member of the National Science Board and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

#10396

Raj Chandra Bose

Raj Chandra Bose

1901 - 1987 (86 years)

Raj Chandra Bose was an Indian American mathematician and statistician best known for his work in design theory, finite geometry and the theory of error-correcting codes in which the class of BCH codes is partly named after him. He also invented the notions of partial geometry, association scheme, and strongly regular graph and started a systematic study of difference sets to construct symmetric block designs. He was notable for his work along with S. S. Shrikhande and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that for no n do there exist two ...

#10397

Israel Nathan Herstein

Israel Nathan Herstein

1923 - 1988 (65 years)

Israel Nathan Herstein was a mathematician, appointed as professor at the University of Chicago in 1951. He worked on a variety of areas of algebra, including ring theory, with over 100 research papers and over a dozen books.

#10398

Nachman Aronszajn

1907 - 1980 (73 years)

Nachman Aronszajn was a Polish American mathematician. Aronszajn's main field of study was mathematical analysis, where he systematically developed the concept of reproducing kernel Hilbert space. He also contributed to mathematical logic.

#10399

Paul Lévy

1886 - 1971 (85 years)

Paul Pierre Lévy was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions. Lévy processes, Lévy flights, Lévy measures, Lévy's constant, the Lévy distribution, the Lévy area, the Lévy arcsine law, and the fractal Lévy C curve are named after him.

#10400

Philip Hall

1904 - 1982 (78 years)

Philip Hall FRS , was an English mathematician. His major work was on group theory, notably on finite groups and solvable groups. Biography He was educated first at Christ's Hospital, where he won the Thompson Gold Medal for mathematics, and later at King's College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951 and awarded its Sylvester Medal in 1961. He was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1955–1957, and awarded its Berwick Prize in 1958 and De Morgan Medal in 1965.

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