Edward Burr Van Vleck

Edward Burr Van Vleck ( born June 7, 1863 in Middletown ( Connecticut ), † June 3, 1943 in Madison ( Wisconsin)) was an American mathematician who focused on function theory and differential equations.

He is the son of astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck (1833-1912), a professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown. Van Vleck studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at Wesleyan University ( Bachelor 1884), from 1885 at the Johns Hopkins University, and from 1887 the University of Göttingen, where he became in 1893 a doctorate in Felix Klein in Mathematics ( For continued fraction expansion Laméscher and similar integrals ). In 1893 he returned to the U.S. and was instructor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In the same year he married. In 1895 he was associate professor at Wesleyan University, where he became professor in 1898. From 1906 he was professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he remained until his retirement in 1929.

In 1903 he was Colloquium Lecturer of the AMS ( Selected topics in the theory of divergent series and continued fractions ). 1913/14, he became president of the American Mathematical Society ( AMS), after he was Vice President in 1909, and was from 1905 to 1910 editor of the Transactions ( after serving as Associate Editor from 1902 ). In 1911, he prevented an imminent collapse of the AMS, after members complained about that the meeting took place only on the east coast, for which one in particular made ​​the Harvard Group with responsibility.

Van Vleck was the most important of his time in the U.S. private collection of Japanese prints ( Ukiyo -e ), which he expanded into the 1920s with prints from the collection of Frank Lloyd Wright. The collection is now in the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison.

In 1916 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. A hall of the University of Wisconsin in 1963 was named after him.

He is the father of Nobel laureate John Hasbrouck Van Vleck.

Writings

• Selected topics in the theory of divergent series and continued fractions, Macmillan 1905, Online