Julian Coolidge

Julian Lowell Coolidge (born September 28, 1873 in Brookline near Boston , Massachusetts , † March 5, 1954 in Cambridge , Massachusetts) was an American mathematician .

academic career

Coolidge graduated from Harvard University , where he met in 1895 summa cum laude his Bachelor did Accounts. He then studied at Balliol College , Oxford , where he graduated in 1897 (the first Bachelor of Science in natural sciences that Oxford awarded). He then worked as a school teacher in Connecticut , where he taught, among other things, Franklin D. Roosevelt , with whom he later remained friends. In 1899 he became an instructor at Harvard and in 1902 an assistant professor . During a trip to Europe he studied with Corrado Segre in Turin and with Eduard Study in Bonn , where he received his doctorate in 1904 (dual projective geometry in elliptical and spherical space). Then he was back at Harvard, where he became an associate professor in 1908 and (after military service as a major in the US Army in World War I - he was a liaison officer to the French General Staff in Paris ) became a professor in 1918 . In 1927 he was visiting professor at the Sorbonne (where he gave courses for members of the US Army during the First World War). From 1927 to 1940 he was chairman of the math faculty at Harvard and in 1940 he retired.

Textbooks

Coolidge wrote several geometry textbooks and also a textbook on probability theory . After his retirement he also published books on the history of mathematics , with his History of Geometric Methods (which also deals with algebraic geometry and differential geometry ) being provided with proofs like an ordinary geometry textbook.

Memberships

In 1924 he was vice president of the Mathematical Association of America and in 1918 of the American Mathematical Society . In 1919 he became a member of the French Legion of Honor . In 1913 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Private

About Martha Jefferson Randolph's daughter Ellen Wayles Randolph (1796–1876), who married Joseph Coolidge (1798–1879), he was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson . He had been married to Therese Coolidge since 1902 and had two sons and five daughters. The eldest, Jane Revere Coolidge (1902-1996), married Walter Muir Whitehill , later director of the Boston Athenæum and Harvard professor.

Fonts

• The Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry, Oxford University Press 1909.
• A Treatise on the Circle and the Sphere, Oxford University Press 1916.
• The Geometry of the Complex Domain, 1924.
• A Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves, Oxford University Press, 1931, Dover 2004.
• An Introduction to Mathematical Probability, 1925.
• A History of Geometrical Methods, Oxford University Press 1940, Dover 2003.
• A History of the Conic Sections and Quadric Surfaces, 1945.
• The Mathematics of Great Amateurs, 1949.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Julian Coolidge. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .