Walter H. Gottschalk

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Walter Helbig Gottschalk (born November 3, 1918 in Lynchburg , Virginia , † February 15, 2004 in Providence , Rhode Island ) was an American mathematician who dealt with topological dynamics.

Gottschalk was the son of a German immigrant who owned a small shop and grew up in Salem . He studied at the University of Virginia with a bachelor's degree in 1939, a master's degree in 1942 and a doctorate under Gustav Hedlund in 1944 ( An Investigation of Continuous Mappings with Almost Periodic Properties ) .Then he was an instructor and later professor at the University of Pennsylvania , From 1955 to 1958 he was head of the mathematics faculty. In 1963 he became a professor at Wesleyan University , where he headed the mathematics faculty from 1964 to 1969 and 1970/71 and retired in 1982.

He is known for his monograph with Hedlund on topological dynamics, which helped establish this field of research. In 1951 he gave a new proof of the graph coloring theorem by Paul Erdős and Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn (every infinite graph can be colored with k colors if and only if this is true for all of its finite subgraphs). 1973 introduced surjunctive groups (defined by cellular automata).

In 1947/48 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1960/61 he did research at Yale University . He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

He had been married since 1952 and had two children. He also made mathematical sculptures (polyhedra) and exhibited them (Franklin Institute in Philadelphia 1963, Davison Art Center of Wesleyan University 1965).

His younger brother Carl (1922-1997) was a physician, kidney specialist and professor at the University of North Carolina .

Fonts

  • with Gustav Hedlund: Topological Dynamics. AMS Colloquium Publications, 1955

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Gottschalk Choice functions and Tychonoff's theorem , Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 2, 1951, p. 172
  4. ↑ Gottschalk Some general dynamical notions , in Recent Advances in Topological Dynamics (Proc. Conf. Topological Dynamics, Yale Univ., New Haven, Conn., 1972; in honor of Gustav Arnold Hedlund on the Occasion of his Retirement) , Lecture Notes in Math., Volume 318, Springer-Verlag, 1973, pp. 120-125
  5. ↑ Gottschalk's Gestalts
personal data
SURNAME Gottschalk, Walter H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gottschalk, Walter Helbig (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Lynchburg , Virginia
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 2004
Place of death Providence , Rhode Island