Gilbert Ames Bliss

Gilbert Ames Bliss ( born May 9, 1876 in Chicago, † May 8, 1951 in Harvey, Illinois) was an American mathematician who worked on the calculus of variations in particular.

Life and work

Bliss studied from 1893 Astronomy and Mathematics ( two years earlier established ) University of Chicago, where he had to pay for college themselves (the family came later to prosperity, when his father was director of the Chicago Power Company ), eg by playing a mandolin quartet. In 1897, he received his bachelor's degree, but turned until 1898, influenced by reading the lectures of Karl Weierstrass on the calculus of variations of 1879, the mathematics. In 1900 he received his doctorate at Oskar Bolza ( Geodesic lines on the anchor ring, Annals of Mathematics 1902), who was also a specialist in the calculus of variations and author of a famous textbook about it. After that, he was instructor at the University of Minnesota. 1902/ 03 he attended the University of Göttingen, where he studied with Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, David Hilbert, Ernst Zermelo, Constantin Caratheodory and Erhard Schmidt met. After that, he was at the University of Chicago, the University of Missouri and in 1905 at Princeton University, where at that time Luther Pfahler Eisenhart, Oswald Veblen and Robert Lee Moore were. In 1908 he became the successor of Heinrich Maschke as a professor in Chicago, where he remained until his retirement in 1941 and from 1927 chairman of the mathematics department was ( as the successor of Eliakim Hastings Moore).

His 1946 published classic textbook of calculus of variations summarizes the older developments together to enrich their own results, when the area already learned by Marston Morse and others a significant realignment. During World War II he worked with Veblen as a ballistics expert at the Aberdeen Proving Ground U.S. Army and turned there methods of calculus of variations to, in a book published in 1944.

He was married twice (his first wife died in the Grippeepedimie after the First World War) and had two children from his first marriage.

In 1916 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1911, he was Vice President and 1921/22, president of the American Mathematical Society Colloquium Lecturer of which he was in 1909. In 1925 he received the first Chauvenet Prize.

Writings

• Algebraic Functions., 1933.
• Mathematics of Exterior Ballistics. , 1944.
• Lectures on the calculus of variations. , 1946.