Edwin F. Beckenbach

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Edwin Ford Beckenbach (born July 18, 1906 in Oak Cliff , Dallas County , Texas , † September 5, 1982 in Syracuse, New York ) was an American mathematician .

Life

Beckenbach was the son of a leather worker and, on his father's side, the grandson of immigrants from Germany. He studied from 1924 at Rice University , where he made his master's degree in 1929 and received his doctorate in 1931 under Lester R. Ford . As a post-doc he was a National Research Fellow at Princeton University , Ohio State University, and the University of Chicago . From 1933 he was an instructor at Rice University and from 1950 Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan . In 1942 he became an associate professor at the University of Texas and from 1945 was a professor at UCLA , where he led the development of the graduate program (the first doctoral student in mathematics at UCLA was supervised by him) and a leader in the establishment of the Institute of Numerical Analysis (1948) was (then a branch of the National Bureau of Standards) where an early tube computer (SWAC) was built in the late 1940s and put into operation in 1950 (for a short time the fastest computer in the world). In 1974 he became professor emeritus. From 1949 to 1963 he was a consultant for the Rand Corporation and in 1951/52 at the Institute for Advanced Study .

In 1958/59 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the ETH Zurich . In 1983 he received the Mathematical Association of America's Distinguished Service Award .

Beckenbach dealt with inequalities , among other things, and organized three Oberwolfach seminars on them (1976, 1978, 1981). He was the co-author of several American mathematics textbooks for high schools (colleges), including on trigonometry, algebra, analytical geometry.

With Frantisek Wolf he founded the Pacific Journal of Mathematics in 1951, of which he was the first editor.

He was married to Madelene Shelby Simons from 1933 to 1960 and had a son and two daughters from this marriage. The marriage ended in divorce in 1960 and he married his second wife, Alice Judson Curtiss, that same year.

Fonts

  • Concepts of Communication , Krieger 1971
  • Inequalities , Results of Mathematics, Springer Verlag, first edition 1961 with Richard Bellman , 2nd edition 1965, 1971
  • with Richard Bellman: Introduction to Inequalities , Random House 1961
  • Published in: Modern Mathematics for the Engineer , McGraw Hill 1957
  • Editor: Applied combinatorial mathematics , Wiley 1964

literature

  • M. Goldberg: In memoriam: Edwin F. Beckenbach , in General Inequalities 4, Oberwolfach 1983 , Basel, Birkhäuser, 1984

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ for example Beckenbach, Irving Drooyan, Michael D. Grady: College Algebra, 7th Edition, Wadsworth 1988
  2. ^ Edwin Ford Beckenbach ( English ) freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com. Retrieved May 21, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Beckenbach, Edwin F.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beckenbach, Edwin Ford (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Oak Cliff , Dallas County , Texas
DATE OF DEATH 5th September 1982
Place of death Syracuse, New York