Hassler Whitney

Hassler Whitney ( born March 23, 1907 in New York City, USA, † May 10 1989 in Princeton ) was an American mathematician who mainly dealt with topology and graph theory.

Whitney's father was a judge, one of his grandfathers, the astronomer Simon Newcomb, another a famous Sanskrit scholar. Whitney studied at Yale ( to BA 1928) and Harvard, where he Birkhoff 1932 with the work of The Coloring of Graphs doctorate. After a short time at the National Research Council, he was first an assistant professor in 1935 and finally in 1946 a full professor at Harvard. Seven years later, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he remained until his retirement in 1977.

During the Second World War he worked on target devices for air defense and for bombs.

Private Whitney was an avid mountaineer. He was married three times and had five children.

Whitney's most important work was in the field of differential topology, ie, in the then fledgling theory of manifolds. His best-known result of the embedding theorem of Whitney. His work on critical issues formed the basis for the well-founded by René Thom catastrophe theory. In addition, Whitney worked with vector bundles and delivered with his boot -Whitney classes an important contribution to the theory of characteristic classes.

In addition to the topology, Whitney also dealt with the graph theory, combinatorics, where he coined the term matroid, the algebraic varieties and the theory of integration. About the latter topic he also wrote his book Geometric Integration Theory, where he provides, among other things, a theoretical basis for application of the theorem of Stokes on manifolds with singularities on its edge.

For his work Hassler Whitney received numerous awards. The most important among them are the National Medal of Science ( 1976), the Wolf Prize (1983 ) and the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society ( 1985). In 1950 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge (Massachusetts ) (r- dimensional integration in n- space).