Paul Shields

Paul Calvin Shields (born November 10, 1933 in South Haven (Michigan) , † September 15, 2016 in Penngrove , California ) was an American mathematician.

Shields studied at Colorado College (with a scholarship due to his activities in tennis) with a bachelor's degree cum laude in 1956 and at Yale University with a master's degree in 1958 and a doctorate with Charles Rickart in 1959 (The Theory of B * pairs). He was then a Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1961 (and was at the Willow Run Labs at the University of Michigan from 1960 to 1962 ). In 1961 he became an assistant professor at Boston University , in 1963 an assistant professor at Wayne State University , was a research associate at Stanford University from 1970 to 1973 and a visiting professor at the University of Warwick in 1973/74 . In 1974 he became associate professor and in 1976 professor at the University of Toledo . In 1999 he retired.

In 1978 he was visiting professor at Cornell University and in 1980/82 at Stanford (both times in the electrical engineering faculty). In 1985 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Budapest at the Eötvös Loránd University and 1985/86 visiting professor at the University of Toronto . He was also at Hayward State University and San José State University .

He wrote books on Bernoulli shifts and ergodic theory . He was known as a math teacher and for constructing counterexamples.

He traveled a lot and recorded folk dances and folk music in Romania and Hungary. Together with his wife Chizu Omori, he drew attention to the internment camps for Americans with Japanese ancestors in the USA during World War II (she won an Emmy for a film about it, Rabbit in the moon ) and collected memories of former internees with her. He has been politically active since participating in the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the 1960s. He was married three times, first marriage 1952 to 1960 with Mary Getman, with whom he had three children, in second marriage with Dorothy Huntwork from 1962 until the divorce in 1983. He also had three children with her. From 2000 to 2009 he was married to Chizu Omori.

After his retirement he was active in the algebra project in Mississippi, which promoted mathematics there.

Fonts

• Theory of Bernoulli Shifts, University of Chicago Press 1973
• Elementary Linear Algebra, 1968, 3rd edition, New York: Worth 1980
• Ergodic Theory of Discrete Sample Paths, American Mathematical Society 1996
• with Imre Csiszár : Information theory and statistics: a tutorial, Hanover: Now Publishers 2005

Web links

• Obituary of his daughter

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and career dates in American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ↑ Paul Shields in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ↑ Obituary at the Algebra Project, 2016 ( Memento of the original from March 23, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.