John Williams Calkin

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Photo of the button from Calkin in Los Alamos.

John Williams Calkin , called Jack, (born October 11, 1909 in New Rochelle , New York , † August 5, 1964 ) was an American mathematician who dealt with functional analysis .

Calkin received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1933 and his master's degree from Harvard University in 1934 , where he received his doctorate from Marshall Stone in 1937 ( Applications of the Theory of Hilbert Space to Partial Differential Equations; the Self-Adjoint Transformations in Hilbert Space Associated with a Formal Partial Differential Operator of the Second Order and Elliptic Type ). In 1937 he went to the Institute for Advanced Study , where he worked with Oswald Veblen and John von Neumann . He was later an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire and the Illinois Institute of Technologyin Chicago. During World War II he worked with John von Neumann (as his assistant), for example, on analysis of naval warfare ( Joseph Doob and Marshall Stone were also involved ) and the effects of shock waves in explosions and probabilistic analysis of bombing patterns. In this function he traveled with von Neumann to England and went with him to Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project . He was also involved in the early development of the hydrogen bomb . From Los Alamos he went to Caltech as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1946 .

In functional analysis, the Calkin algebra is named after him.

Stanislaw Ulam , a colleague in Los Alamos, describes him as tall, good-looking, with more savoir-faire than most mathematicians .

He is the father of Brant Calkin, an environmental activist in New Mexico and Utah and past president of the Sierra Club .

literature

  • S. Hassi, HSV de Snoo, FH Szafraniec (editor) Operator methods for boundary value problems , London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes, Cambridge University Press 2012, with biography of Calkin, abstract
  • JW Calkin Abstract symmetric boundary conditions , Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 45, 1939, pp. 369-442, online

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Saunders MacLane, Requiem for the Skillful, Notices AMS, February 1997, pdf . He mentions him as one of the few mathematicians in Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project, with John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam , CJ Everett, Paul Olum
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project , they give the middle name Wilson. In the dissertation, he thanks John von Neumann for discussions
  3. ↑ The membership book of the IAS from 1980 states 1942
  4. ^ Calkin Two-sided ideals and congruences in the ring of bounded operators in Hilbert space , Annals of Mathematics, Volume 42, 1941, pp. 839-873
  5. ^ Stanislaw Ulam Adventures of a Mathematician , Scribner 1976, p. 145
  6. ↑ Brant Calkin
personal data
SURNAME Calkin, John Williams
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH New Rochelle
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 1964