Henry Seely White

Henry Seely White (born May 20, 1861 in Cazenovia , New York , † May 20, 1943 in Poughkeepsie ) was an American mathematician.

Live and act

White studied mathematics and astronomy with John Monroe Van Vleck (the father of Nobel Prize winner John H. van Vleck ) at Wesleyan University in Middletown (Connecticut) . After graduating in 1882, he became Van Vleck's assistant at the university's observatory. He taught math and chemistry at the Centenary Collegiate Institute in Hackettstown , New Jersey, and was a tutor at Wesleyan University before going to Leipzig University in 1887 , where he studied with Sophus Lie and Eduard Study . After one semester, he moved to the University of Göttingen , where he received his doctorate from Felix Klein in 1891 ( Abelian integrals on singularity-free, simply covered, complete intersection curves of an arbitrarily extended space ). Klein also included him in the writing of his lectures, but he returned to the USA in 1890. There he became a teacher at Northwestern University in Evanston , was briefly at Clark University in 1890 (where, however, there were conflicts in leadership shortly afterwards, which led to the dismissal of many professors) and from 1892 assistant professor at Northwestern University. In 1894 he received a full professorship there. With the Chicago mathematicians Eliakim Hastings Moore , Oskar Bolza and Heinrich Maschke , he organized the mathematicians 'congress at the world exhibition in Chicago in 1893, the first major mathematicians' congress in the USA. In this context, Felix Klein also gave later (1894) published lectures in Evanston. At a suggestion by White, these became the model for the Colloquium Lectures of the American Mathematical Society . In 1903 he himself gave the Colloquium Lectures ( Linear Systems of curves on algebraic surfaces ). In 1905 he became a professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, later a famous college for women. In 1936 he retired.

White dealt with algebraic geometry of algebraic curves and surfaces and with invariant theory. In 1901 he was vice president and from 1907 to 1908 president of the American Mathematical Society. From 1899 to 1905 he was editor of the Annals of Mathematics and 1907 to 1914 of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. In 1915 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1912 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Cambridge, England ( The Place of Mathematics in Engineering Practice ).

He had been married since 1890 and had three children.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Henry Seely White. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .