John C. Oxtoby

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John Corning Oxtoby (born September 14, 1910 in Saginaw , Michigan , † January 2, 1991 in Haverford , Pennsylvania ) was an American mathematician . He was a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and studied measurement theory and ergodic theory .

Life

Oxtoby studied mathematics and physics at the University of California, Berkeley and at Harvard University , where he was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1936 to 1939 (which is why he did not do a doctorate because he did not need to do so as a Junior Fellow). From 1939 he was at Bryn Mawr College , where he received a full professorship in 1954 and from 1948 to 1976 headed the mathematics faculty. In 1975 he became a Class of 1897 Professor of Mathematics and in 1979 he retired.

He wrote a popular textbook on measure theory. He is known for the Oxtoby and Ulam theorem. George David Birkhoff and Eberhard Hopf hypothesized that measure-preserving homeomorphisms of manifolds are generally ergodic. This was proven by Oxtoby and Stanisław Marcin Ulam in the late 1930s when they were Junior Fellows at Harvard with Marshall Harvey Stone .

He has also been a visiting scholar at Yale University , visiting professor at Haverford College and the University of Utah, and Hedrick Lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America . He was one of the editors of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

In 1978 he received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Lindback Foundation.

Fonts

  • Measure and Category, Springer Verlag 1971, 2nd edition 1980
    • German edition: Measure and Category, Springer 1971
  • with Ulam: Measure-preserving homeomorphisms and metrical transitivity, Annals of Mathematics, Volume 42, 1941, pp. 874-920.

literature

  • George Caspar Homans, Orville Taylor Bailey: The Society of Fellows. The University, Cambridge, Mass., 1948, p. 474.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Oxtoby, John C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oxtoby, John Corning
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Saginaw , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH 2nd January 1991
Place of death Haverford , Pennsylvania