Ralph Boas

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Ralph P. Boas junior (born August 8, 1912 in Walla Walla , Washington , † July 25, 1992 in Seattle ) was an American mathematician who dealt with topology and analysis .

life and work

Boas was the son of an English teacher, graduated from high school at the age of 15 and studied at Harvard University , where he switched from his original intention to study chemistry or medicine to mathematics, graduated in 1933 and received his doctorate in 1937 under David Widder . He then worked as a post-doc with Salomon Bochner at Princeton University and in England at Cambridge University , where he heard Godfrey Harold Hardy , John Edensor Littlewood and Abram Samoilowitsch Besikowitsch . From 1939 to 1942 he was at Duke University , taught at a US Navy flight school during World War II and was then a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1950 he became a (full) professor at Northwestern University , where he stayed until his retirement in 1980 and was long-term chairman (1957 to 1972) of the mathematics faculty. He was also active as a mathematician afterwards and was co-editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications from 1985 to 1991.

Boas was the first editor (1945) of " Mathematical Reviews ", where his talent for languages ​​was useful. His book "A primer of real functions" was re-edited by his son, the mathematician Harold P. Boas .

He also wrote numerous articles for the American Mathematical Monthly (of which he was editor from 1976 to 1981), including some joking content. The best known is his investigation (with the Englishman Frank Smithies and possibly other colleagues, when both were post-docs at Princeton) the big game hunting under mathematical aspects (H. Pétard "A contribution to the mathematical theory of Big Game Hunting", American Mathematical Monthly , September 1938, p. 446). Their application of the theorem of Bolzano and Weierstrass to the capture of lions in the Sahara read z. E.g. “Divide the desert into two parts by a line running in north-south direction. The lion is either in the eastern or western half. Suppose he's in the west half. Divide it in two with a line in an east-west direction. The lion is either in the north or south half. We assume it is in the northern half. We continue the process ad infinitum and in this way construct a strong network around the selected half in each step. The diameter of these areas tends to zero, so that the lion is surrounded at the end by a network of any small diameter. "

Boas also published mathematical works under the pseudonym ES Pondiczery (possibly with co-authors), including in the American Mathematical Monthly and in Mathematical Reviews. A theorem he proved under this name in 1944 perpetuated his pseudonym as the Hewitt-Marczewski-Pondiczery theorem (a special case is the theorem that the product of no more than c separable spaces is separable , where c is the cardinal number of the continuum).

Boas-Buck polynomials are named after him and Robert Creighton Buck (1958).

1973/74 he was President of the Mathematical Association of America and 1959/60 he was Vice President of the American Mathematical Society . Philip Davis and R. Creighton Buck are among his PhD students .

Boas was married to the physicist Mary Boas , a professor at DePaul University , since 1941 . With her he had a daughter and two sons, Harold P. Boas is a math professor at Texas A&M University .

Anecdotes

When the mathematicians' group, using the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki, asked for admission to the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the latter agreed (through its secretary, JR Kline) only if they would pay the higher fees for institutions rather than for individuals. Bourbaki's response was to send a letter to the editor that Boaz, in turn, was a pseudonym for the editors of Mathematical Reviews. Boas had made himself a target for Bourbaki when he publicly revealed for the yearbook of the Encyclopedia Britannica that it was a pseudonym (which Boas had known since meeting Bourbaki member André Weil in 1939).

Fonts

  • G. Alexanderson, D. Mugler (Editors) "Lion Hunting & Other Mathematical Pursuits," Mathematical Association of America , 1995.
  • Entire Functions 1954
  • Invitation to complex analysis 1987
  • A primer to real functions 1960
  • with R. Creighton Buck: Polynomial expansions of analytical functions 1958

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson, Constance Reid More Mathematical People - Contemporary Conversations , Academic Press 1994

Web links

Notes and references

  1. ^ Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, French, German, Russian
  2. ↑ The name, according to a letter from the author to the magazine, a pseudonym of his real name Pondiczery, HWO Pétard comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet: The engineer, host with his own petard
  3. ^ "The Bolzano-Weierstrass Method. Bisect the desert by a line running NS. The lion is either in the E portion or in the W portion; let us suppose him to be in the W portion. Bisect this portion by a line running EW. The lion is either in the N portion or in the S portion; let us suppose him to be in the N portion. We continue this process indefinitely, constructing a sufficiently strong fence about the chosen portion at each step. The diameter of the chosen portions approaches zero, so that the lion is ultimately surrounded by a fence of arbitrarily small perimeter. ”The article and various follow-up articles that it produced are in the book Lion Hunting and Other Mathematical Pursuits: A Collection of Mathematics , verses and stories by the late Ralph P. Boas, Jr. reprinted
  4. ↑ Follow- up articles were e.g. BO Morphy Some Modern Mathematical Methods in the Theory of Lion Hunting , American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 75, 1968, pp. 185-187, R. Mathiesen "Linguistic Contributions To The Formal Theory Of Big-Game Hunting", Lingua Pranca, 1978 .
  5. ↑ The initials ESP stand for Extrasensory Perception (extrasensory perception )
  6. ^ Pondiczery Power problems in abstract spaces Duke Mathematical Journal, Vol. 11, 1944, p. 837
  7. ↑ Boas Bourbaki and me , Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 8, 1986, pp. 84/85
  8. ^ Aczel The artist and the mathematician - the story of Nicholas Bourbaki , 2007, p. 121 ff
personal data
SURNAME Boas, Ralph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boas, Ralph Philip
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 8, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Walla Walla (Washington)
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1992
Place of death Seattle