Andrew Gleason

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Andrew Mattei Gleason (born November 4, 1921 in Fresno , California , † October 17, 2008 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was an American mathematician .

Andrew Gleason, Berlin 1959

Life

Gleason went to school in Berkeley and Yonkers and studied at Yale University from 1938 to 1942 with a bachelor's degree. In 1940 he was a Putnam Fellow . During World War II he was in the US Navy at the break involved Japanese codes as well as the deciphering of the Enigma . After the war he was at Harvard , where he was a Junior Fellow from 1946 to 1950. Since 1950 he worked at the faculty at Harvard, from 1957 as a professor. In between he spent two years with the US Navy during the Korean War (mid-1950 to mid-1953). In 1966 he was officially discharged from the Navy with the rank of Commander. From 1969 he was Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. In 1992 he retired. He never did a PhD.

Gleason was one of those (with Leo Zippin , Deane Montgomery , Hidehiko Yamabe ) who solved the 5th Hilbert problem in the 1950s (to show that locally Euclidean groups are Lie groups, that is, have differentiable group effects), especially with his work “ Groups without small subgroups ”from 1952. Afterwards he worked a. a. with operator algebras, combinatorics and the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. In 1966 he published the book " Fundamentals of abstract analysis ".

Gleason in the US Navy in the 1940s

Gleason was invited speaker at the 1950 International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Massachusetts ( One parameter subgroups and Hilberts Fifth Problem ) and in Nice ( Weight polynomials of self dual codes and the MacWilliams identities ). He won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize and received the Yue-Gin-Gung and Charles Hu Prize from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), of which he held Hedrick Lectures in 1962. Gleason was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1956), and the American Philosophical Society (1977). In 1953 he received an honorary master’s degree (AM) from Harvard. In 1981/82 he was President of the American Mathematical Society. In 1986 he was President of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley .

Andrew Gleason with Jean (Berko) Gleason 1958

He was active in mathematics education and from 1959 to 1964 chaired the Advisory Board of the School Mathematics Study Group. In 1963 he was co-chair of the Cambridge Conference on School Mathematics.

Since 1959 he was married to Jean Berko, a psychology professor at Boston University, with whom he had three daughters.

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson, Constance Reid More Mathematical People - Contemporary Conversations , Academic Press 1994
  • Benjamin H. Yandell: The honors class. Hilbert's problems and their solvers. AK Peters, Natick MA 2001

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Death of AMS Members , In: Notices of the AMS , Volume 56, No. 1, p. 64 (PDF, English; 14.8 MB)
  2. ↑ Annals of Mathematics, Volume 56, 1952, pp. 193-212
  3. ↑ Published by Addison-Wesley. New edition 1991 by AK Peters
  4. ^ Member History: Andrew M. Gleason. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 4, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Gleason, Andrew
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gleason, Andrew Mattei (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Fresno , California
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 2008
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts