John L. Kelley

John Leroy Kelley (born December 6, 1916 in Kansas , † November 26, 1999 in Oakland (California) ) was an American mathematician.

Kelley in Berkeley 1968

Life

Kelley studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he made his bachelor's degree in 1936 and his master's degree in mathematics in 1937. In 1940 he received his doctorate from Gordon Whyburn , a mathematician from the Moore School, on A study of hyperspaces . He then taught at the University of Notre Dame . During World War II he worked on ballistics problems in the Aberdeen Proving Ground , the ballistics research center of the US Army, where his later colleagues from Berkeley Anthony Morse and Charles Morrey were. A ballistics textbook with Edward McShane emerged from the work in 1953 . From 1946 to 1947 he taught at the University of Chicago and then at the University of California, Berkeley , where he stayed until his retirement in 1985. In 1950 he was fired from there with 29 other colleagues when he refused to take an oath of loyalty required by the McCarthy committees, and taught at Tulane University and the University of Kansas , before following a ruling by the California Supreme Court of Justice Oath declared inadmissible, was reinstated in 1953. 1957 to 1960 and 1975 to 1980 he was chairman of the mathematics faculty there. In Berkeley he was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Among other things, Kelley was visiting professor in Kanpur , India and at Cambridge University .

Kelley dealt with general topology and functional analysis . His 1955 book General Topology is considered a classic. In the appendix of the book he presents a variant of the set-theoretical axioms (Morse-Kelley set theory) developed by himself and Anthony Morse .

Kelley was also active in mathematics education and participated in an NBC program for teaching math on television ( Continental Classroom ) as early as 1960 . As a member of the School Mathematics Study Group, he was involved in the introduction of New Mathematics (with set theory as the basis, in the sense of building mathematics according to Bourbaki) in the USA in the 1960s. In 1964 he introduced the Mathematics for Teachers course in Berkeley and the teaching for it resulted in a book with Richert in 1970. From 1977 to 1978 he was a member of the US Commission for Mathematical Instruction.

Fonts

• General topology, van Nostrand, 1955, Springer 1976 ISBN 0-387-90125-6
• with Isaac Namioka, KTSmith, WFDonoghue junior: Linear Topological Spaces. Van Nostrand, 1963
• with Donald Richert: Elementary Mathematics for Teachers 1970.

Web links

• Obituary in Berkeley