Ernest Michael

Ernest Arthur Michael ( born August 26, 1925 in Zurich, † April 29, 2013 in Seattle ) was an American mathematician.

Ernest Michael was born to German - Jewish parents in Zurich and grew up in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In anticipation of the takeover of power by the National Socialists, he finally emigrated with his family in 1932, first in the Netherlands and 1939 in the U.S.. At 15 he graduated from high school there in 1941 and studied civil engineering at Cornell University. Finally, a year later he turned to mathematics. After an interruption caused by a war effort in the Navy interrupted his studies of 1944-46 he made in 1947 with a BA from Cornell University and in 1948 at Harvard, his MA degree. At the University of Chicago, he received his doctorate in 1951 with the work " Locally Convex Algebras - m " at Irving Segal. In 1953, he joined as an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, in 1956 associate professor, full professor in 1963 and remained there until his retirement in 1993.

Michael's main area of ​​work was the set topology and there specially founded by his theory of continuous -valued cuts pictures. His most famous result in this area is the Michaelsche average rate. In addition, the Michael line of the Arens- Michael decomposition associated with his name.