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Who's That Mathematician? Images from the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection

Author(s): 
Janet Beery (University of Redlands) and Carol Mead (Archives of American Mathematics, University of Texas, Austin)

William Arveson

This page is a duplicate of page 2 of the article whose title is given above and for which a new page featuring six photographs will be posted at the start of each week during 2012.  Please see the introduction to this article and, with it, the article thus far.

Paul Halmos photographed William Arveson (1934-2011) on January 6, 1970, possibly in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Indiana University Mathematics Department offices, where Halmos was a professor at the time.  Arveson had been a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1968.  He would spend the rest of his career at Berkeley, where he worked on functional analysis and operator algebras.  He retired in 2003 but continued to publish research papers until his death in 2011.

 

AschbacherMichael Aschbacher is shown at Indiana University in Bloomington in February of 1980, the year he won the American Mathematical Society’s Cole Prize in Algebra for his work in finite group theory.  Aschbacher, who was and is professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), won both the AMS Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition and the Wolf Prize in 2012.

 

 

Richard Askey 1980Halmos and Richard (Dick) Askey "met in the middle" in Evanston, Illinois, at least twice during the early 1980s.  Halmos was a faculty member at Indiana University, Bloomington, from 1969 to 1985 and Askey has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1963 (professor emeritus since 2003).  The photo of Askey at left was taken in May of 1980 in Evanston, perhaps during an AMS Sectional Meeting at Northwestern University.

Halmos photographed Askey again in November of 1983 in Evanston.  The occasion was almost certainly an AMS Sectional Meeting, as Halmos noted that he himself spoke during an AMS Special Session on Operator Theory in Classical Function Spaces.  Askey has worked on orthogonal polynomials and special functions throughout his long career at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  He also has shown a strong interest in mathematics education.

Richard Askey 1983

Lininger, Atiyah

The photo at left shows Lloyd Lininger (left) and Sir Michael Atiyah (right) in Ann Arbor, Michigan on April 3, 1968.  Halmos was a faculty member at the University of Michigan from 1961 through 1968.  Atiyah had won the Fields Medal in 1966 and published his book K-theory, which included discussion of the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem, in 1967 (MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive).  He was knighted in 1983.  According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, Lininger had earned his Ph.D. in 1964 at the University of Iowa with the dissertation “Some Results on Crumpled Cubes” under Steve Armentrout, whose photograph appears on page 1 of this collection. 

Atiyah and Doob

The photo above shows Atiyah (left) with Joseph Doob (right) in Honolulu, Hawaii on March 29, 1969.  Halmos spent the 1968-1969 academic year at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.  In fact, he affixed an address label to the back of this photograph that gave his address as “3760 Diamond Head Circle, Honolulu, Hawaii” and this photo may well have been taken at his home.  Halmos identified the woman at upper left in the photo as “J. Shields.”  Probabilist Joseph Doob had been Halmos' Ph.D. advisor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  He also is pictured on page 1 of this collection.

Sources:

Janet Beery (University of Redlands) and Carol Mead (Archives of American Mathematics, University of Texas, Austin), "Who's That Mathematician? Images from the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection," Convergence (February 2012)

Convergence