Nelson James Dunford (December 12, 1906 – September 7, 1986) was an American mathematician, known for his work in functional analysis, namely integration of vector valued functions, ergodic theory, and

linear operator In mathematics, and more specifically in linear algebra, a linear map (also called a linear mapping, linear transformation, vector space homomorphism, or in some contexts linear function) is a mapping V \to W between two vector spaces that pr ...

s. The Dunford decomposition, Dunford–Pettis property, and Dunford-Schwartz theorem bear his name. He studied mathematics at the University of Chicago and obtained his Ph.D. in 1936 at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Provide ...

under Jacob Tamarkin. He moved in 1939 to Yale University, where he remained until his retirement in 1960. In 1981, he was awarded jointly with

Jacob T. Schwartz __NOTOC__ Jacob Theodore "Jack" Schwartz (January 9, 1930 – March 2, 2009) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was the ...

, his Ph.D. student, the well-known Leroy P. Steele Prize of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

for the three-volume work ''Linear operators''. Nelson Dunford was coeditor of

Transactions of the American Mathematical Society The ''Transactions of the American Mathematical Society'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of mathematics published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in 1900. As a requirement, all articles must be more than 15 ...

(1941–1945) and Mathematical Surveys and Monographs (1945–1949).

Publications

* * Nelson Dunford, Jacob T. Schwartz, Linear Operators, Part I General Theory , Part II Spectral Theory, Self Adjoint Operators in Hilbert Space , Part III Spectral Operators

References

* Obituary in Notices Amer. Math. Soc., Vol. 34, 1987, p. 287

External links

* 1906 births 1986 deaths People from St. Louis Mathematicians from Missouri 20th-century American mathematicians Brown University alumni Yale University faculty Operator theorists University of Chicago alumni {{US-mathematician-stub