Edward Burr Van Vleck
Edward Burr Van Vleck (born June 7, 1863 in Middletown (Connecticut) , † June 3, 1943 in Madison (Wisconsin) ) was an American mathematician who dealt with function theory and differential equations.
He is the son of the astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck (1833-1912), professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown. Van Vleck studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at Wesleyan University (bachelor's degree in 1884), from 1885 at Johns Hopkins University and from 1887 at the University of Göttingen , where he received his doctorate in mathematics under Felix Klein in 1893 ( on the continued fraction development Laméscher and similar integrals ) . In 1893 he returned to the United States and became an instructor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In the same year he married. In 1895 he became an associate professor at Wesleyan University, where he became a professor in 1898. From 1906 he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he stayed until his retirement in 1929.
In 1903 he was Colloquium Lecturer at the AMS ( Selected topics in the theory of divergent series and continued fractions ). In 1913/14 he became president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), after he was vice president in 1909, and was editor of its Transactions from 1905 to 1910 (after he had previously been associate editor from 1902). In 1911 he prevented a threatened collapse of the AMS after members complained that the meetings only took place on the east coast, for which the Harvard faction was blamed in particular.
Van Vleck had the most important private collection of Japanese prints ( ukiyo-e ) in the USA at the time , which he expanded in the 1920s with prints from the collection of Frank Lloyd Wright . The collection is now in the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison.
In 1911 Van Vleck was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1916 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. A hall at the University of Wisconsin was named after him in 1963.
He is the father of Nobel Prize winner John Hasbrouck Van Vleck .
Fonts
- Selected topics in the theory of divergent series and continued fractions , Macmillan 1905, online
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Edward Burr Van Vleck. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Individual evidence
- ↑ One of Harvard's chiefs, William Fogg Osgood, claimed to be suffering from insomnia outside the walls of his university
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Van Vleck, Edward Burr |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 7, 1863 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Middletown |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 3, 1943 |
| Place of death | Madison |