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

For more information about Paul R. Halmos (1916-2006) and about the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection, please see the introduction to this article on page 1.  A new page featuring six photographs will be posted at the start of each week during 2012.

Halmos photographed operator theorist Ronald G. Douglas in 1966, possibly at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where both were mathematics faculty members at the time. Douglas earned his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University in 1962 with the dissertation "Structure of L(p) Spaces." He has advised at least 24 Ph.D. students, most of them at the State University of New York, Stony Brook (Mathematics Genealogy Project), where he was a professor and administrator from 1969 to 1996. He is now Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Texas A & M University in College Station, where he has held both administrative and faculty positions since 1996 (Texas A & M University).

Daniel Ray and Underwood Dudley were photographed in 1971.  Ray earned his Ph.D. in 1953 from Cornell University under probabilist Mark Kac, while Dudley earned his Ph.D. in 1965 from the University of Michigan under number theorist William Judson LeVeque.  LeVeque had earned his Ph.D. at Cornell under Kac in 1948 (Mathematics Genealogy Project).  Ray was professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1957 to 1979 (MIT).  Dudley spent most of his career, from 1967 to 2004, at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he is now emeritus. He has written several books, many of them published by the MAA (amazon).

Halmos photographed William L. Duren (1905-2008) on Oct. 14, 1971, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he was University Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Duren earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1930 with a dissertation in calculus of variations written under G. A. Bliss. He was professor of mathematics at his alma mater, Tulane University, from 1931 to 1955; Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia from 1955 to 1962; and University Professor and founding member of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Virginia from 1962 to 1976 (University of Virginia). Duren was MAA president during 1955-56 and a founding member of the MAA Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) (MAA Presidents).

Peter Duren was photographed on Feb. 24, 1968, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he and Halmos were mathematics professors.  Duren is now Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Michigan; Halmos spent the 1968-69 academic year at University of Hawaii and then moved to Indiana University.  Duren earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 under Gian-Carlo Rota (Mathematics Genealogy Project).  He has advised 25 Ph.D. students at the University of Michigan (University of Michigan).  In addition to numerous books and articles in complex analysis, he edited the American Mathematical Society's three-volume set, A Century of Mathematics in America, published in 1988 (University of Michigan).

William L. Edge (1904-1997) is pictured during the British Mathematical Colloquium, in Dundee, Scotland, in April of 1965. Halmos was a plenary speaker on "Some recent progress in Hilbert space" at the 1965 BMC (BMC Speakers, MacTutor Archive). Edge received his Ph.D. from Cambridge on projective geometry and spent most of his career at Edinburgh University, specializing in finite geometry (MacTutor Archive).

Halmos photographed Samuel Eilenberg (1913-1998) in 1970.  Eilenberg earned his doctorate in point-set topology from the University of Warsaw in 1936 under advisor Karol Borsuk (see page 8 of this collection for a photograph). He moved to the U.S. in 1939, spending most of his career at Columbia University in New York City. He was a second-generation member of Bourbaki, invited in 1949 to write about homotopy groups for the project. Eilenberg is most famous for the books Foundations of Algebraic Topology, with Norman Steenrod, and Homological Algebra, with Henri Cartan (MacTutor Archive).

For an introduction to this article and to the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection, please see page 1. Watch for a new page featuring six new photographs each week during 2012.

Regarding sources for this page:  Information for which a source is not given either appeared on the reverse side of the photograph or was obtained from various sources during 2011-12 by archivist Carol Mead of the Archives for American Mathematics, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin.