Henry Seely White

Henry Seely White ( born May 20, 1861 in Cazenovia, New York, † May 20 1943 in Poughkeepsie ) was an American mathematician.

Life and work

White studied at Wesleyan University in Middletown (Connecticut), where he heard ( the father of Nobel laureate John H. van Vleck ) Mathematics and Astronomy at John Monroe Van Vleck and after the bachelor's degree in 1882 whose assistant was at the Observatory of the University. He taught at the Centenary Collegiate Institute in Hackettstown, New Jersey mathematics and chemistry and was a tutor at Wesleyan University before he went in 1887 to the University of Leipzig, where he studied with Sophus Lie and Eduard Study. After one semester, he moved to the University of Göttingen where he. Received his doctorate in 1891 with Felix Klein ( Abelian integrals on singularity free, easy -covered, complete intersection curves of an arbitrarily extended space ) Klein also tied him equal in the transcript of his lectures, but in 1890 he returned to the United States. There he became an instructor at Northwestern University in Evanston, 1890 was briefly at Clark University (where there but shortly afterwards came to conflicts in the guide that had the dismissal of many professors ' absence) and in 1892 assistant professor at Northwestern University. In 1894 he received a full professorship. With the Chicago mathematicians Eliakim Hastings Moore, Oskar Bolza and Heinrich Maschke, he organized the Congress of Mathematicians in 1893 at the World Fair in Chicago, the first major Congress of Mathematicians in the United States. In this context, Felix Klein later (1894 ) held lectures published in Evanston. On a proposal from White this became the model of the Colloquium Lectures of the American Mathematical Society. In 1903, he gave himself the Colloquium Lectures ( linear system of curves on algebraic surfaces ). In 1905 he became a professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, later a famous college for women. In 1936, he went into retirement.

White dealt with algebraic geometry of algebraic curves and surfaces and invariant theory. In 1901, he was Vice President and 1907-1908 President of the American Mathematical Society. 1899 to 1905 he was editor of the Annals of Mathematics and 1907-1914 of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. In 1915 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1912 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Cambridge, England ( The Place of Mathematics in Engineering Practice).

He was married in 1890 and had three children.