Donald Spencer
Donald Clayton Spencer (born April 25, 1912 in Boulder , Colorado ; † December 23, 2001 in Scottsdale , Arizona ) was an American mathematician who mainly worked in algebraic geometry and analysis (including partial differential equations ).
Live and act
Donald Spencer studied at the University of Colorado (Bachelor 1934) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Bachelor in Aircraft Technology 1936) and received his doctorate in 1939 from the University of Cambridge in England under John Edensor Littlewood and Godfrey Harold Hardy ( On the Hardy- Littlewood Problem of Diophantine Approximations and Its Generalizations ). He then worked at MIT from 1939 to 1942 and then at Stanford University . From 1950 to 1963 he was at Princeton University , from 1963 to 1968 again at Stanford and then again until 1978 as a professor at Princeton.
From the 1940s worked with Albert Schaeffer on the Bieberbachsche problem (coefficients in the power series expansion of simple functions). In the 1950s he developed the Kodaira-Spencer theory (deformation theory of complex structures) with Kodaira Kunihiko in Princeton , for which he is best known.
In 1948 he received the Bôcher Memorial Prize with AC Schaeffer . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1961 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1967 . In 1989 he received the National Medal of Science . In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Overdetermined operators: some remarks on symbols ).
His PhD students include Phillip Griffiths and Pierre Conner .
Fonts
- Selecta, 3 volumes, World Scientific, 1985.
- with Schaeffer: Coefficient regions for simple functions. AMS Colloquium Publications 1950.
- with M. Schiffer: Functionals of Finite Riemann Surfaces. Princeton 1954.
- with Nickerson, Norman Steenrod : Advanced Calculus. Van Nostrand 1959.
- with A. Kumpera: Lie equations. Vol. 1, Annals of Mathematical Studies, Princeton 1972.
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Donald Spencer. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
- Obituary Notices AMS 2004 (PDF file, 473 kB)
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spencer, Donald |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Spencer, Donald Clayton (full name); Spencer, Donald C .; Spencer, DC |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 25, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boulder |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 23, 2001 |
| Place of death | Scottsdale , Arizona |