W. Wistar Comfort
William Wistar Comfort (born April 19, 1933 in Bryn Mawr , Pennsylvania , † November 28, 2016 in Middletown , Connecticut ) was an American mathematician .
To distinguish him from his grandfather William Wistar Comfort (1874-1955), Romanist and from 1917 to 1940 President of Haverford College , after which he is named, mostly quoted W. Wistar Comfort and called Wis Comfort. His father, Howard Comfort, was the head of Classics at Haverford College.
Comfort studied at Haverford College with a bachelor's degree in 1954 and at the University of Washington with a master's degree in 1957 and a doctorate with Edwin Hewitt in 1958 (Silov Boundaries Induced by Certain Banach Algebras). From 1958 to 1961 he was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University . From 1961 he was Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester , from 1965 Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and from 1967 Professor at Wesleyan University , from 1982 as Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor . He was several times head of the mathematics faculty (1970 to 1971, 1980 to 1982 and 1996 to 1997). He retired in 2007 but continued to work on publications until shortly before his death.
Comfort dealt with general topology, topological groups, Stone-Čech compactification , topological analysis and ultrafilter theory . From 1983 to 1986 he was Associate Editor of the American Mathematical Monthly . He was a fellow of the American Mathematical Society . Stylianos Negrepontis was one of his PhD students.
He was a Quaker. As a hobby he played the trombone in Dixieland jazz bands. In 1957 he married Mary Constance Lyon, with whom he had two children.
Fonts (selection)
- with Stylianos Negrepontis : The Theory of Ultrafilters, Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften 211, Springer 1974
- with Negrepontis: Continuous Pseudometrics, Marcel Dekker 1975
- with Negrepontis: Chain Conditions in Topology, Cambridge University Press, 1982
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
- ↑ W. Wistar Comfort in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Comfort, W. Wistar |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Comfort, William Wistar; Comfort, Wis |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 19, 1933 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bryn Mawr , Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 28, 2016 |
| Place of death | Middletown , Connecticut |