Theorem of the Day

Mathematicians deserving a better web presence

This is an annex to the Index of Mathematicians. The following entries in that index are elusive on the web as people however ubiquitous and important their mathematical work. If you know of a link that I could use in my Index I would be greatful to hear of it. Better still, offer an article to the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive or to Wikipedia, so that everyone may benefit.

Herman Theodor Rendtorff Aude

Some information comes from Find A Grave. Some anecdotes are contained in this 1958, Comencement Address by Honorable William P. Rogers Attorney General of the United States (750K pdf).

T.L. Austin

Was elected to membership of the AMS (600KB pdf) in 1960. His expertise in enumeration is elsewhere found here (1958) and here (1959).

Garland Briggs

He was a student of James Alexander according to the latter's genealogy, being award his PhD in 1927. He was elected to AMS membership in February 1922. He 'belongs' to Sebrell, Southampton county, Virginia, according to this 1925 Princeton yearbook entry. His dates may be 1894–1959 see here, entry 823 and here. Internet searches for his details are hampered by his name being shared with a character in Twin Peaks.

John Wesley Brown

Was at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (and was listed under Emeritus but this seems to have lapsed). His entry at Mathematics Genealogy.

Rolf Bungers

Some minimal information is available from the German DMV here. His entry at Mathematics Genealogy.

Jérôme Dégot

Teaches at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris. His entry at Mathematics Genealogy.

Ketan Dalal

Was listed as a former postgraduate/post-doc at McGill. (The listing was posted on Nicholas Sonnerat's page at McGill but he appears to have moved elsewhere.)

David Daykin

There is a short memorial tribute to him here. He is known for the Ahlswede–Daykin inequality.

James A. Dunn

Was at the Education Centre, New University of Ulster in the 1970s.

Cecil John Alvin Evelyn

An obituary of Evelyn appears in Bull. London Math. Soc., vol. 9, no. 3, 1977. The first page, covering all but a photo and refs, may be previewed for free. A tangential reference can be found on p. 88 of Dürer and Beyond: Central European Drawings Before 1700 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he appears to be selling, in 1966, a collection of drawings by Melchoir Lorck, which had been acquired by his family in the 1600s.

Robert E. Fagen

Was awarded a PhD in 1953 at University of Minnesota for a dissertation entitled "Certain probability limit theorems and transformations of stochastic processes." There is a record at p. 220 here (7MB pdf) of his being promoted in 1951 from Teaching Assistant to Research Assistant, with a salary rise from $810 to $1215.

Dmitry Falikman

He is recorded as having a post at Technion Minerva Optimization Center (although this link no longer appears to mention his name). His entry at Mathematics Genealogy.

Amiel Feinstein

Was with San José State University (1966–1986). He was a PhD student at MIT. His role in the proof of Shannon's Theorem is described here, (search for 'Feinstein') and there is an indistinct picture of him on p. 18 here (4.18 MB). In his entry at Mathematics Genealogy his advisor is Robert Fano, son of Gino (Fano-plane) Fano.

Dmitri G. Fon-Der-Flaass

He has an account at mathoverflow.net, a Wikidata entry and Math Genealogy entry. Peter Cameron wrote a short tribute to him at the time of his early death and then a longer one a few years later. Obiturary by M. Axenovich and A. Kostochka. A tribute volume in Fon-Der-Flaass's memory has been edited by Elena Konstantinova: (20MB pdf, English and Russian).

Ervin Gergely

Hungarian and active in design theory in the 70s.

Giuseppe Giuga

Known for his 1950 publication "Su una presumibile proprietà caratteristica dei numeri primi",Ist. Lombardo Sci. Lett. Cl. Sci. Mat. Nat. Rend. (3) 14 (1950), 511–528. More on the journal may be found here.

Jean-Marie Goethals

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy. His career took him to Philips in Eindhoven but he has no web presence there. An annecdote by Peter Cameron can be found here who also has a nice presentation (500KB pdf) about its context.

Dick Wick Hall

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy. He is obscured by being (I assume it is the same DWH Jr) the son of a famous humorist of the same name. Some reminiscences of James R.F. Kent including mention of Hall during his time at Binghamton are here. His PhD was at Virginia in 1938 and he supervised at Maryland College Park (reminiscences from that time). It seems he was adopted during childhood, and that he suffered from cerebral palsy.

Orville G. Harrold Jr

Was a 1957 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow (includes a picture of him). Worked at Florida State University where there is a chair named after him (current occupant John Bryant). Community of Scholars profile.

Ljubomir Iliev

Sendov has given a nice centenary tribute to him. His entry at Mathematics Genealogy.

Dennis Ivanov

Collaborator of Serge Tabachnikov (Penn State) giving his address as Moscow, Russia.

Edouard Jablonski

There is an entry for him here on a site maintained by Ronald Brassuer (scroll down to "Accès direct à chacune des 357 notices du Dictionnaire 1852-1914"). There is a portrait of him by Michel Richard-Putz.

Robert Lachlan

Graduated from Tinity College Cambridge, 3rd Wrangler, 1883, 1st Division in Part III., 1884. Then Smith's prizewinner (one A.N. Whitehead was a runner-up!) (Nature 33, 93-93, 26 November 1885), at which time he was a mathematics instructor at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, then returning to Cambridge as a coach in 1899 ("Geometry at Cambridge, 1863–1940", June Barrow-Green, Jeremy Gray, Historia Mathematica, vol. 33, (3), 315-356). Published his work on systems of circles in 1886 (Proc. Royal Soc.). Contributed to a book on mathematics of map making by Gerald Maxwell which was (unfavourably) reviewed in The Geographical Journal, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Aug., 1916), pp. 168-170. June Barrow-Green has alerted me to a fairly complete record in the Alumni Cantabrigiensis. There is also a short tribute to him at findagrave.com.

Leo Jerome Lange

An obituary notice is here.

Félix Lucas

His 1879 paper giving the Gauss-Lucas Theorem is online via the French Wikipedia entry on the theorem.

Endre Makai

A record of his affiliation to the Alfréd Rényi Institute.

Ernest Malo

Probably the soldier whose 1915 death at the age of 59 is recorded here (29MB pdf, see p. 130). Since he died in mid-November his birth was most likely in 1856, and this is confirmed by internet search (but not in a citable form).

Willem Mantel

His eponymous theorem dates from 1907 but I know nothing of him at all. I only know his first name thanks to an entry in Knuth's Art of Computer Programming (Pre-facsimmile 2a. A Draft of Section 7.2.1.1 Generating All n-Tuples) which refers on p. 23 to different work by him.

Marvin Marcus

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy. Obituary entry at legacy.com. An obituary in Linear and Multilinear Algebra by Russell Merris.

Henryk Minc

Emeritus at University of California Santa Barbara who offer, however, no information upon him. A biographical article by Marvin Marcus appeared in Linear and Multilinear Algebra in 2003. An obituary is here and an autobiographical article.

G.B. Money-Coutts

Most likely to be Godfrey Burdett Money-Coutts (1905–1979) whose details are given here in Darryl Lundy's The Peerage

Lee Most

He contributes to math.stackexchange.

Mel Most

Recorded, on the only paper by them that I know of (1992), as being of New York (deceased)

Morris Newman

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy. Was at UC Santa Barbara. A short biography given here.

Edgar Milan Palmer

His entry at math genealogy. Has a valuable obituary notice here.

 

Michael J. Piff

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy. Was at Sheffield University.

M.T. Powell

Was a research student of John Tyrrell at King's College London in the 1970s according to this source (p. 98, footnote). Tyrrell's entry at Math Genealogy however, lists no descendents.

James E. Pretty

Was at the Education Centre, New University of Ulster in the 1970s.

Paul Robin

Presumably not the educationalist who was working at the same time. There was a chemist of this name also active and it is plausible that a chemist might have published on tilings. However, the original article by Robin in La Nature is categorised under "Variétés. -- Généralités. -- Statistique" rather than "Chimie". The article is available online but gives no affilliation.

Giannantonio Rocca

According to Massa Esteve here (endnote 20) he was a pupil of the Jesuit College of Parma. Paulo Mancosu describes him in Philosophy of Mathematics & Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century as being "close to Cavalieri and Torricelli" and there is a little more on this relationship in this article by Amir Alexander.

William Schneeberger

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy. He was John H Conway's student at Princeton but has seemingly moved on.

George Earl Schweigert

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy. Worked 1947–1965 at University of Pennsylvania.

Dorothy Manning Smiley

She has a comprehensive entry in Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke's Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD's, AMS/LMS, 2009, which can be viewed in googlebooks (provided this link stays active). She has an entry in the Mathematics Genealogy (under Manning). Listed as a 1938/39 scholar at the Institute of Advanced Studies.

Malcolm Finley Smiley

His entry at Mathematics Genealogy .Some details can be found in Green and LaDuke, see under Dorothy Manning Smiley.

Wilfred Leslie Stevens

An obituary (paywalled, preview here) by Frank Yates; the year of Stevens' birth is given in this article by Pedro Ricardo Fonseca.

Larry H. Thiel

Was publishing from CSE at Concordia University in 2006 but does not appear in staff lists. Graduated BA in Mathematics from Michigan State University in 1967 (see here, p. 54).

John Alfred Tyrrell

His entry at math genealogy. An obituary appears in Bull. London Math. Soc., vol. 43, no. 2, 2011, which my be previewed free here.

Brian Wick

His entry at math genealogy. Taught at University of Alaska Anchorage, where a scholarhip bears his name. He retired in 2010 (Matters Mathematical report by Hans Nordstrom, Seattle Meeting, April 9-10, 2010, online as rtf file).

C.P. Willans

Willans' formula for π(n) was published in 1964 from "The University, Birmingham". Some thorough but inconclusive research by MrDannyDetail is posted in the comments to this nice Eric Rowland Youtube video on Willan's formula. This finds a Christopher Paul Willans whose birth is registered in 1942 Bradford and who most probably matches a death registered in 1971 in Bradford of a Christopher Paul Willans who was born 17th January 1942. This would suggest the formula was the work of a postgraduate who then died tragically young and, from MrDannyDetail's research, with neither issue nor siblings. Thanks to Arthur Newlands (twitter @ArthurNewlands) for telling me about this. Further corroboration has been provided by Neil Howell who found an entry in the Shipley Times and Express, 17th September, 1958, recording 'O'-level passes for a C.P. Willans in scripture, English language, English literature and French (but no mention of mathematics). The image is followed by the result of Neil's further enquries.

Dear Neil Thank you for your recent enquiry regarding C. P. Willans. Having checked the class list records, I can confirm that he attended Bradford Grammar School from 1953 until 1959. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to find any further information regarding his mathematical ability or his study destination after leaving the school. Kind regards, Alison Alison Park Senior Library and Archives Assistant The Clarkson Library

These investigations seem conclusive enough to record his name and dates in his Mathematicians listing (but insufficient, one would say, for the creation of a Wiki entry).

Steven Winker

His entry at math genealogy. Got his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1984. I'm told he left automated reasoning research during the 80s.

Guang Ping Xiang

His entry at math genealogy.