James Michael Gardner Fell (4 December 1923,

Vancouver Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

– 16 December 2016,

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) was a Canadian-American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis and representation theory. He is known for Fell bundles (''i.e.'' Banach *-algebraic bundles). He was an accomplished linguist who knew Sanskrit, Icelandic, German, French, Russian, Greek, and Latin.

Biography

J. M. G. Fell's father was James Pemberton Fell, a colonel in the Canadian Army Corps of Engineers and a real estate developer who helped to lay out the streets of North Vancouver. J. M. G. Fell attended elementary school in Vancouver and then in 1935 went to England for secondary school at Eton. In 1940 he returned to Canada and matriculated at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

, graduating there in 1943 at the age of 19. In 1951 he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

under John L. Kelley with thesis ''On L-spaces''. He was an assistant professor at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

from 1953 to 1955, a research associate at the University of Chicago from 1955 to 1956, and an assistant professor, then associate professor, and then full professor at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

from 1956 to 1965. He was a full professor from 1965 to 1991 at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

, where he retired as professor emeritus. On 4 July 1957 Fell married Angela Daphne Rachel MacDonald. He was an Invited Speaker at the

ICM ICM may refer to: Organizations * Irish Church Missions, an Anglican mission * Institut du Cerveau, the Paris Brain Institute, a research center * Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw * Interna ...

in 1970 in Nice. He gave a mathematical lecture at the

University of Iceland The University of Iceland ( ) is a public research university in Reykjavík, Iceland, and the country's oldest and largest institution of higher education. Founded in 1911, it has grown steadily from a small civil servants' school to a modern co ...

, and in 2000 the University gave him an honorary doctorate in theology. Upon his death he was survived by his wife, two children, and a grandson.

Fell bundles

Selected publications

* * * * * * * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fell, James Michael Gardner 1923 births 2016 deaths 20th-century Canadian mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians University of British Columbia alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Washington faculty University of Pennsylvania faculty Canadian emigrants to the United States