Edward James McShane

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Edward James McShane (born May 10, 1904 in New Orleans ( Louisiana ), † June 1, 1989 in Charlottesville ( Virginia )) was an American mathematician .

Life

The son of a doctor and a school teacher, Edward James McShane studied mathematics and engineering at Tulane University , where he received his bachelor's degrees in engineering and maths in 1925 and his master's degree in mathematics in 1927. In 1930 he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago with Gilbert Ames Bliss (interrupted by two years at the University of Wichita, where he taught as an instructor for financial reasons). The title of the dissertation was Semi-Continuity in the Calculus of Variations and absolute Minima for Isoperimetric Problems . After stays in Princeton , Ohio State University , Harvard University , Chicago and Göttingen (1932-1933) and Princeton again, he took up a professorship at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1935 , where he remained until his retirement in 1974. 1942-1945 he led a mathematicians group on ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground .

His mathematical fields of work included integration theory , functional analysis , calculus of variations , mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics (especially the integration methods used in quantum field theory and the treatment of the divergent integrals occurring there) and stochastic integration . In the USA he wrote well-known textbooks on the theory of integration (including an introduction to the Lebesgue integral in 1944) and several monographs. He translated Richard Courant's well-known lectures on differential and integral calculus into English in 1934.

McShane had taken the joke that when asked on a security form from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds whether he had ever been in contact with organizations advocating the violent overthrow of the US government, he was an employee of the state of Virginia as is well known, fought on the side of the southern states in the US Civil War. In the McCarthy era, this earned him an invitation from the Committee for Un-American Activities , which, however, had no further consequences.

From his work at the Aberdeen Proving Ground during World War II, a monograph on external ballistics with the mathematician John L. Kelley emerged , which appeared in 1953 and was a standard work at the time.

EJ McShanes honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1948 and an honorary doctorate from Tulane University in 1949. In 1959 and 1960 he was President of the American Mathematical Society , whose Colloquium Lecturer he was in 1943. From 1953 to 1954 he was President of the Mathematical Association of America , whose Distinguished Service Award he received in 1964. In 1959 he became an elected member of the American Philosophical Society .

In 1953 he received the Chauvenet Prize (for Partial Orders and Moore-Smith Limits, American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 59, 1952, pp. 1-11).

He had been married since 1931 and had two daughters and a son.

Fonts

  • Integration, Princeton University Press 1944, 1947
  • Order preserving maps and integration processes, Princeton University Press 1953 (on the integrals occurring in quantum field theory)
  • Stochastic calculus and stochastic models, Academic Press 1974
  • Unified integration, Academic Press 1983
  • with Truman Arthur Botts: Real Analysis, Princeton 1959, Dover 2005
  • with John L. Kelley, Franklin Reno: Exterior Ballistics, University of Denver Press 1953

literature

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Edward J. McShane. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 30, 2018 .