Edwin F. Beckenbach

Edwin Ford Beckenbach ( born July 18, 1906 in Oak Cliff, Dallas County, Texas, † September 5, 1982 in Syracuse, New York ) was an American mathematician.

Biography

Beckenbach was the son of a leather worker and paternal grandson of immigrants from Germany. He studied from 1924 at Rice University, where in 1929 he took his master's degree in 1931 and his doctorate in Lester R. Ford. As a post-doc, he was a National Research Fellow at Princeton University, Ohio State University and the University of Chicago. From 1933 he was instructor at Rice University and since 1950 Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. In 1942 he became associate professor at the University of Texas and was from 1945 professor at UCLA, where he led the development of a graduate program (the first graduate student in mathematics at UCLA was supervised by him) and a leader in the founding of the Institute of Numerical Analysis (1948 ) (then a branch of the National Bureau of Standards ) built at the end of the 1940s, an early tube computer ( SWAC ) and was taken in 1950 in operation ( for a short time at that time the fastest computer in the world). In 1974 he became Professor Emeritus. 1949 to 1963 he was a consultant to the Rand Corporation, and 1951/52, the Institute for Advanced Study.

1958/59 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the ETH Zurich. In 1983 he received the Distinguished Service Award from the Mathematical Association of America.

Beckenbach dealt among other things with inequalities and organized three seminars to Oberwolfach ( 1976, 1978, 1981). He co-authored a number of U.S. mathematics textbooks for secondary schools ( colleges ), among other things, Trigonometry, Algebra, Analytical Geometry.

With Frantisek Wolf he founded in 1951, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, the first publisher he was.

He was from 1933 to 1960 married Madelene Shelby Simons and had by this marriage a son and two daughters. In 1960, the couple divorced and married in the same year his second wife, Alice Judson Curtiss.

Writings

  • Concepts of Communication, Warrior 1971
  • Inequalities, results in mathematics, Springer Verlag, first edition in 1961 with Richard Bellman, 2nd edition 1965, 1971
  • Richard Bellman: Introduction to Inequalities, Random House 1961
  • Publisher: Modern Mathematics for the Engineer, McGraw Hill 1957
  • Publisher: Applied combinatorial mathematics, Wiley 1964
Dallas County (Texas) Syracuse (New York) Richard E. Bellman
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