Richard Lashof

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Richard Lashof

Richard Kenneth Lashof (born November 9, 1922 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † February 4, 2010 in Alameda , California ) was an American mathematician who studied geometric topology and differential topology.

Lashof studied chemical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in 1943, was an officer in the US Navy (responsible for communications) from World War II to 1946 and received his doctorate in 1954 from Columbia University under Richard Kadison (Topological Group Extensions and Lie Algebras of Locally Compact Groups). From 1954 he was an instructor at the University of Chicago . In 1959/60 he was a Senior Fellow of the National Science Foundation. From 1960 to 1961 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1964 he was given a full professorship and from 1967 to 1970 he was chairman of the mathematics faculty in Chicago. In 1988 he retired. He was active in the civil rights movement in Chicago and moved to Alexandria, Virginia , in 1977 and to Berkeley, California in 1982 (where his wife was dean).

He was visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia .

With Melvin Rothenberg he developed the smoothing theory of PL manifolds at the end of the 1950s (like Morris W. Hirsch and Barry Mazur ) and he and Rothenberg developed a smoothing theory for topological manifolds at the end of the 1960s (and especially their triangulation).

In 1963 he received the Quantrell Award from the University of Chicago for excellent teaching with undergraduates. In 1964/65 he directed the National Science Foundation's summer school for urban high school students in Chicago who had poor performance in math.

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice (The immersion approach to triangulation and smoothing).

He was married to the physician Joyce Lashof (* 1926) and had three children.

His PhD students include Robert Stong and John Smillie .

Fonts

  • with Dan Burghelea, Melvin Rothenberg: Groups of automorphisms of manifolds, Springer, Lecture notes in Mathematics, 1975
  • with M. Rothenberg: G-smoothing theory, in: RJ Milgram, Algebraic and Geometric Topology, Proc. AMS Summer Conference, Stanford 1976, Proc. Symposium Pure Math., Volume 32, American Mathematical Society, 1978, pp. 211-266
  • with Shiing-Shen Chern : On the total curvature of immersed manifolds, Part 1, American Journal of Mathematics, Volume 79, 1957, pp. 300-318, Part 2, Michigan J. Math., Volume 5, 1958, p. 5 -12, online
  • The immersion approach to triangulation, in Cantrell, Edwards, Topology of Manifolds, Chicago: Markham 1970, 52-57
  • with M. Rothenberg: Triangulation of manifolds, 1,2, Bulletin AMS, Volume 75, 1969, 750-757

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Lashof in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ^ Obituary, San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 2010
  3. ^ Hirsch, Mazur, Smoothing of piecewise linear manifolds, Annals of Mathematical Studies, Princeton 1974
personal data
SURNAME Lashof, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lashof, Richard Kenneth (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH February 4, 2010
Place of death Alameda (California)