Richard Palais

Richard Sheldon Palais ( May 22nd, 1931 in Lynn, Massachusetts) is an American mathematician who deals with differential geometry and global analysis.

Palais studied at Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1952 and 1954 for his Masters degree in 1956 and his doctorate at Andrew Gleason and George Mackey (A Global Formulation of the Lie Theory of Transformation Groups, Memoir of the AMS 1957). 1956 to 1958 he was instructor at the University of Chicago and from 1958 to 1960 at the Institute for Advanced Study (as well as 1963/64 1968 /69 1974/75 ). Since 1960 he was at Brandeis University as Assistant Professor, starting in 1962 as an associate professor and from 1965 as a professor. 1966 to 1968 he was chairman of the mathematics department. He remained at Brandeis until his retirement in 2003, interrupted by a period from 1976 to 1978 as a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and 1981/82 as a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. 1984/85 he was a member of the MSRI in Berkeley and 1987 Visiting Professor of Nankai Institute of Mathematics Tianjin. As of 2004, Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he developed software for the visualization of mathematics.

In addition to differential geometry, the theory of compact differentiable transformation groups, Geometry of submanifolds, Morse theory, nonlinear global analysis, he also dealt with the theory of solitons and visualization of mathematics.

He is married to the mathematician Chuu - Lian Terng, a professor at Northeastern University and now also in Irvine.

1965 to 1967 he was a Sloan Fellow. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Nice ( Banach manifolds of fiber bundle sections ). 1971 to 1978 he was a Trustee of the American Mathematical Society. 1965 to 1982 he was editor of the Journal of Differential Geometry and 1966 to 1969 of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. In 1979 he was co-founder and chairman of the TEX User Group. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

His doctoral include Karen Uhlenbeck, Leslie Lamport and Edward Beer Stone.

Writings

  • Publisher: Seminar on the Atiyah -Singer index theorem, Annals of Mathematical Studies No. 4, Princeton, 1964
  • The classification of G -spaces, Memoirs AMS 1960
  • Foundations of Global Nonlinear Analysis, Benjamin 1968
  • The geometrization of physics, Tsinghua University Press 1981
  • Real algebraic differential topology, Publish or Perish 1981
  • With Terng: Critical point theory and submanifold geometry, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Bd.1353, Springer 1988
  • Palais Symmetry of solitons, Bulletin AMS, Vol 34, 1997, p.339 -403, Abstract
  • Palais The visualization of mathematics, Notices AMS 1999, pdf file
Lynn (Massachusetts) Andrew M. Gleason Chuu-Lian Terng Integrated Authority File
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