Paul Sally

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Sally 2008

Paul Joseph Sally Junior (born January 29, 1933 in Boston , Massachusetts , † December 30, 2013 in Chicago ) was an American mathematician who deals with p-adic analysis and representation theory, and in particular with mathematics education.

Live and act

Sally graduated from Boston College with a bachelor's degree in 1954 and then taught in high schools . In 1956 he received his master's degree from Boston College and in 1965 he received his doctorate under Ray Kunze at Brandeis University ( Analytic Continuation of the Irreducible Unitary Representations of the Universal Covering Group of the 2 × 2 Real Unimodular Group ). From 1965 he taught at the University of Chicago .

He received his first award for teaching at the University of Chicago in 1967 and, from 1970, coordinated mathematics competitions for high school students in the Chicago area and organized a university program for high school students. In 1983 he was the first director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP), which from 1998 published the Everyday Mathematics program (also known as Chicago Math ), a novel curriculum for elementary school students (with materials published by McGraw Hill). Right from the start there were violent protests, for example in an open letter in the Washington Post to Secretary of the Department of Education Richard Riley in 1999, signed by three Nobel Prize winners and four Fields Medalists. The critics missed traditional elementary subjects such as fractions. In California, too, it was initially not approved (that only changed in 2007 with a special edition for California by McGraw Hill) and in Texas the third edition was not approved in 2007 (although many schools there were already teaching according to older editions). Overall, however, the program was very successful. He founded Elementary Specialists and Mathematics Educators (SESAME) in 1992 and a Young Scholars Program for high school students in Chicago in 1988 with Diane Herrmann. He wrote several school books.

Sally has been to the Institute for Advanced Study several times , where he worked with Joseph Shalika .

In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He was diabetic and because of his illness he wore two prosthetic legs and an eye patch. He was married to the mathematician Judith D. Sally and has three sons.

Fonts

  • Trimathlon: a workout beyond the school curriculum, AK Peters 2003
  • with Diane Herrmann: Number, Shape and Symmetry: an Introduction to Mathematics, Brooks Cole 2004
  • with Diane Herrmann: Number Theory and Geometry for College Students, Brooks Cole 2005
  • with Judith Sally: Roots to Research: A Vertical Development of Mathematical Problems, AMS 2007
  • Tools of the Trade: Introduction to Advanced Mathematics, AMS 2008
  • with JA Shalika Characters of the discrete series of representations of SL (2) over a local field , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 1968
  • Fundamentals of mathematical analysis, AMS 2013

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in Chicago Tribune
  2. ↑ Paul Sally in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  3. ↑ Official website
  4. ↑ Riley Letter, Washington Post, November 18, 1999 , listing the signatories, including Fields Prize winners Shing-Tung Yau , Edward Witten , Vaughan Jones , Paul Cohen , mathematicians such as Saunders MacLane , Jeff Cheeger, and Louis Nirenberg , John McCarthy and Nobel Prize winners Steven Weinberg , Sheldon Lee Glashow , Steven Chu
personal data
SURNAME Sally, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sally, Paul Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2013
Place of death Chicago