William Lloyd Garrison Williams

William Lloyd Garrison Williams (born October 3, 1888 in Labette County , Kansas , † January 31, 1976 ) was a Canadian - American mathematician and university professor .

life and work

Williams was the only son of Nathan Williams and his second wife, Dunreath Truex, and was named after William Lloyd Garrison , who led the successful abolitionist campaign against slavery in the United States. After his mother's death, he was raised on his grandparents ’farm in Indiana and attended elementary school and the local Quaker Academy. Thanks to the efforts of his teachers, he was able to study at Haverford College , took some math classes, and received a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford , where he studied math. In the summer months he did research at the University of Chicago , where he met his future wife, the pianist Anne Christine Sykes. In 1920 he did his doctorate with Leonard Eugene Dickson at the University of Chicago with the dissertation: Fundamental Systems of Formal Modular Seminvariants of the Binary Cubic. He taught at Cornell University until 1924 and then took a position at the Mathematics Institute at McGill University in Montreal , Canada, where he taught until 1954. In 1925, Elbert Frank Cox , the first African American , received his doctorate from Cornell University , for whom he arranged a scholarship so that this could accompany him to research at McGill University. From 1943 Williams worked to found a Canadian mathematical forum and in 1945 designed the Canadian Mathematical Congress. He was elected treasurer of the company and remained in that position until 1965. In 1978 the Canadian Mathematical Society was founded as a non-profit organization in order to avoid confusion with the four-year mathematical congresses. Williams was honored for his contributions to the mathematical life of Canada: he received honorary degrees from the University of Montreal, the University of Manitoba , Dalhousie University, and Mount Allison University . In addition to helping found the Canadian Mathematical Society, he helped found a Canadian Save the Children Fund. In 1954 he joined the board of directors of the Canadian Friends Service Committee and was chairman of the committee from 1959 to 1963.

literature

• CW Ayoub : My recollections of the early days of the congress and of my father, Lloyd Williams, in Canadian Mathematical Society 1945–1995, Vol 1, Canadian Math. Soc., Ottawa, ON, 1995.
• R. Bott: Autobiographical sketch, in RD MacPherson (ed.), Raoul Bott: collected papers Vol. 1. Topology and Lie groups, Birkhäuser Boston, Inc., Boston, MA, 1994.
• B. Robinson: WLG Williams (1888-1976), Proc. Roy. Soc. Canada (4) 14, 1976.

Web links

• William Lloyd Garrison Williams in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  William Lloyd Garrison Williams. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Photo from 1945