Sheldon Jay Axler (born November 6, 1949,

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

) is an American mathematician and textbook author. He is a professor of mathematics and the Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a Public university, public research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It was established in 1899 as the San Francisco State Normal School and is ...

. He graduated from

Miami Palmetto Senior High School Miami Palmetto Senior High School is a public high school located at 7431 S.W. 120th Street in Pinecrest, Florida. The school is on in southwest Miami-Dade County, and is part of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools district. Miami Norland Sen ...

Miami Miami is a East Coast of the United States, coastal city in the U.S. state of Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade County in South Florida. It is the core of the Miami metropolitan area, which, with a populat ...

Florida Florida ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Alabama to the northwest, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the north, the Atlantic ...

in 1967. He obtained his AB in mathematics with highest honors at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

(1971) and his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in mathematics, under professor

Donald Sarason Donald Erik Sarason (January 26, 1933 – April 8, 2017) was an American mathematician whose research topics included Hardy space theory and VMO. As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley he became the doctoral advisor of 39 gradu ...

, 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 ...

, with the dissertation "Subalgebras of

L^

" in 1975. As a postdoc, he was a

C. L. E. Moore instructor The job title of C. L. E. Moore instructor is given by the Math Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to recent math Ph.D.s hired for their promise in pure mathematics research. The instructors are expected to do both teaching and res ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. He taught for many years and became a full professor at

Michigan State University Michigan State University (Michigan State or MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State o ...

. In 1997, Axler moved to

, where he became the chair of the Mathematics Department. Axler received the

Lester R. Ford Award ''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of mathematics. It was established by Benjamin Finkel in 1894 and is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Mathematical Association of America. It is an expositor ...

for expository writing in 1996 from the

Mathematical Association of America The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university A university () is an educational institution, institution of tertiary edu ...

for a paper titled "Down with Determinants!" in which he shows how one can teach or learn linear algebra without the use of

determinant In mathematics, the determinant is a Scalar (mathematics), scalar-valued function (mathematics), function of the entries of a square matrix. The determinant of a matrix is commonly denoted , , or . Its value characterizes some properties of the ...

s. Axler later wrote a textbook, ''Linear Algebra Done Right'' (4th ed. 2024), to the same effect. In 2012, he became a fellow 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, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Retrieved November 3, 2012. He was an Associate Editor of the ''

American Mathematical Monthly ''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of mathematics. It was established by Benjamin Finkel in 1894 and is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Mathematical Association of America. It is an exposi ...

'' and the Editor-in-Chief of the

Mathematical Intelligencer ''The Mathematical Intelligencer'' is a mathematical journal published by Springer Science+Business Media that aims at a conversational and scholarly tone, rather than the technical and specialist tone more common among academic journals. Volumes ...

Books

* ''Linear Algebra Done Right'', fourth edition,

Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics (UTM) () is a series of undergraduate-level textbooks in mathematics published by Springer-Verlag. The books in this series, like the other Springer-Verlag mathematics series, are small yellow books of a stand ...

, Springer, 2024. * (with John E. McCarthy, and Donald Sarason) editors. ''Holomorphic Spaces'',

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

1998. * (with Paul Bourdon, and Wade Ramey
''Harmonic Function Theory'', second edition

Graduate Texts in Mathematics Graduate Texts in Mathematics (GTM) () is a series of graduate-level textbooks in mathematics published by Springer-Verlag. The books in this series, like the other Springer-Verlag mathematics series, are yellow books of a standard size (with va ...

, Springer, 2001. * ''Harmonic Function Theory software'', a

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

package for symbolic manipulation of

harmonic function In mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of stochastic processes, a harmonic function is a twice continuously differentiable function f\colon U \to \mathbb R, where is an open subset of that satisfies Laplace's equation, that i ...

s, version 7.00, released 1 January 2009 (previous versions released in 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2008). * ''Precalculus: A Prelude to Calculus'', Wiley, 2009 (third printing, 2010). * (with

Peter Rosenthal Peter Michael Rosenthal (June 1, 1941 – May 25, 2024) was an American-Canadian mathematician, lawyer, and activist who was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, and an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Toronto Law S ...

and Donald Sarason) editors
''A Glimpse at Hilbert Space Operators''

Birkhäuser Birkhäuser was a Swiss publisher founded in 1879 by Emil Birkhäuser. It was acquired by Springer Science+Business Media in 1985. Today it is an imprint used by two companies in unrelated fields: * Springer continues to publish science (parti ...

, 2010. * ''College Algebra'',

John Wiley & Sons John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Publishing, publishing company that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company was founded in 1807 and pr ...

2011. * ''Algebra & Trigonometry'', John Wiley & Sons, January 2011. * ''Measure, Integration & Real Analysis'' (open access, updated 2020), Springer, November 2019.

References

External links

Axler's Home Page
*
College of Science & Engineering Newsletter
from San Francisco State University.
Senior Fellow Sheldon Axler
from

California Council on Science and Technology The California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) is an independent, not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization designed to offer expert advice to the California state government and to recommend solutions to science and technology-related pol ...

.
Author profile
in the database

zbMATH zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastru ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Axler, Sheldon 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 1949 births Living people San Francisco State University faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Princeton University alumni Place of birth missing (living people) UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni Educators from Miami Michigan State University faculty Mathematicians from Philadelphia Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty American textbook writers