Richard William Beals (28 May 1938,

Erie, Pennsylvania Erie is a city on the south shore of Lake Erie and the county seat of Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, fifth-most populous city in Pennsylvania and the most populous in Northwestern Pen ...

) is an American mathematician who works on

partial differential equations In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which involves a multivariable function and one or more of its partial derivatives. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" that solves the equation, similar to how ...

and

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (for example, Inner product space#Definition, inner product, Norm (mathematics ...

. He is known as the author or co-author of several mathematical textbooks. Beals studied at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

earning a B.A. in 1960, an M.A. in 1962, and a Ph.D. in 1964 under

Felix Browder Felix Earl Browder (; July 31, 1927 – December 10, 2016) was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Socie ...

with thesis ''Non-Local Boundary Value Problems for Elliptic Partial Differential Operators''. In the academic year 1965/1966 he was a visiting assistant professor at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

, where he became in 1966 an

assistant professor Assistant professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doct ...

and later a professor. In 1977 he became a professor at Yale University. Beals works on

inverse problem An inverse problem in science is the process of calculating from a set of observations the causal factors that produced them: for example, calculating an image in X-ray computed tomography, sound source reconstruction, source reconstruction in ac ...

s in

scattering theory In physics, scattering is a wide range of physical processes where moving particles or radiation of some form, such as light or sound, are forced to deviate from a straight trajectory by localized non-uniformities (including particles and radiat ...

integrable system In mathematics, integrability is a property of certain dynamical systems. While there are several distinct formal definitions, informally speaking, an integrable system is a dynamical system with sufficiently many conserved quantities, or first ...

s, pseudodifferential operators,

complex analysis Complex analysis, traditionally known as the theory of functions of a complex variable, is the branch of mathematical analysis that investigates functions of complex numbers. It is helpful in many branches of mathematics, including algebraic ...

, global analysis and transport theory. He has been married since 1962 and has three children. He should not be confused with the mathematics professor at

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

named R. Michael Beals (born in 1954), who is Richard Beals's brother.

Works

* * * Advanced mathematical analysis; periodic functions and distributions, complex analysis, Laplace transform and applications, Springer Verlag 1973
2013 pbk edition
* with M. Salah Baouendi and Linda Preiss Rothschild (eds.
''Microlocal Analysis''
American Mathematical Society 1984 * with Roderick Wong
Special functions: a graduate text
Cambridge University Press 2010 ** (Revised with 4 new chapters.) * Topics in Operator Theory, University of Chicago Press 1971 *2015 pbk edition

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Beals, Richard 1938 births Living people People from Erie, Pennsylvania Mathematicians from Pennsylvania 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Partial differential equation theorists Yale College alumni Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni University of Chicago faculty Yale University faculty