Daniel Burrill Ray (5 February 1928,

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–United States border, Canada–U.S. maritime border ...

– 19 February 1979) was an American mathematician. He is known for Ray-Singer torsion. Ray received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1949 from

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...

and his Ph.D. from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

in 1953 under

Mark Kac Mark Kac ( ; Polish: ''Marek Kac''; August 3, 1914 – October 26, 1984) was a Polish-American mathematician. His main interest was probability theory. His question, " Can one hear the shape of a drum?" set off research into spectral theory, th ...

with thesis ''On Spectra of Second Order Differential Operators''. As a postdoc he was a Frank B. Jewett Fellow in 1953/54 at

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...

. From 1957 to 1979 he was a professor at

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 ...

. In 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1961 he was at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

.Daniel B. Ray, Institute for Advanced Study
/ref> He was a Sloan Fellow.

Selected publications

* On spectra of second-order differential operators. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 77 (1954) 299–321. * Stationary Markov processes with continuous paths. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 82 (1956) 452–493. * Stable processes with an absorbing barrier. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 89 (1958) 16–24. * with R. M. Blumenthal and R. K. Getoor: On the distribution of first hits for the symmetric stable processes. . Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 99 (1961) 540–554. *Sojourn times and the exact Hausdorff measure of the sample path for planar Brownian motion . Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 106 (1963) 436–444.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ray, Daniel Burrill 20th-century American mathematicians New York University alumni Cornell University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Sloan Research Fellows 1928 births 1979 deaths Harvard College alumni