Joseph Albert Wolf (October 18, 1936 – August 14, 2023) was an American mathematician at 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 ...

Life and career

Wolf graduated from 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 ...

with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and with his master's degree in 1957 and his Ph.D. under the supervision of

Shiing-Shen Chern Shiing-Shen Chern (; , ; October 26, 1911 – December 3, 2004) was a Chinese American mathematician and poet. He made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He has been called the "father of modern differential geome ...

in 1959 (''On the manifolds covered by a given compact, connected Riemannian homogeneous manifold''). From 1960 to 1962, as a post-doctoral researcher, 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 ...

in Princeton, New Jersey (and again from 1965 to 1966). In 1962 he was assistant professor and since 1966 he has been professor at Berkeley. Wolf considered applications of group theory to differential geometry and complex manifolds and applications of harmonic analysis to the theory of elementary particles and control theory. In 1994 he received the

Humboldt Research Award The Humboldt Research Award (), also known informally as the Humboldt Prize, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of Germany in recognition of t ...

and in 1977 the Medal of the

University of Liège The University of Liège (), or ULiège, is a major public university of the French Community of Belgium founded in 1817 and based in Liège, Wallonia, Belgium. Its official language is French (language), French. History The university was foun ...

. In 1989 he received an honorary professorship at the

National University of Cordoba National may refer to: Common uses * Nation or country ** Nationality – a ''national'' is a person who is subject to a nation, regardless of whether the person has full rights as a citizen Places in the United States * National, Maryland, ce ...

in Argentina. From 1972 to 1973 and from 1983 to 1984, he was a Miller Research Professor in Berkeley. Wolf was 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, ...

and member of the

Swiss Mathematical Society The Swiss Mathematical Society, SMS (, SMG; ), founded in Basel on 4 September 1910, is the national mathematical society of Switzerland. It is a member of the European Mathematical Society. History The SMS was established on 4 September 1910 ...

. From 1965 to 1967 he was a

Sloan Fellow The Sloan Fellows program is a middle and senior-career master's degree program in general management and leadership offered at MIT, Stanford University, and London Business School (LBS). Initially supported by a grant from Alfred P. Sloan, fo ...

. He held a

Miller A miller is a person who operates a mill, a machine to grind a grain (for example corn or wheat) to make flour. Milling is among the oldest of human occupations. "Miller", "Milne" and other variants are common surnames, as are their equivalents ...

Research Professorship twice, in the 1972–73 and 1983–84 academic years. Joseph A. Wolf died on August 14, 2023, at the age of 86.

Writings

*''Spaces of constant curvature'', McGraw Hill 1967, 6. Edition AMS Chelsea Publ. 2011 *''Harmonic analysis on commutative spaces'', American Mathematical Society, Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, Vol. 142, 2007 *''Spherical functions on Euclidean space'', J. Funct. Anal., volume 239, 2006, pp. 127–136 *With Gregor Fels,

Alan Huckleberry Alan Trinler Huckleberry (born February 18, 1941) is an American mathematician who works in complex analysis, Lie groups actions and algebraic geometry. He is the Professor of Mathematics at Ruhr University Bochum and Wisdom Professor of Mathe ...

''Cycle spaces of flag domains: a complex geometric viewpoint'', Progress in Mathematics 245, Birkhäuser, 2006 ** *''Classification and fourier inversion for parabolic subgroups with square integrable nilradical'', Memoirs AMS 225, 1979 *''Unitary representations of maximal parabolic subgroups of the classical groups'', Memoirs AMS 180, 1976 *''Representations on partially holomorphic cohomology spaces'', Memoirs AMS 138, 1974 *Editor ''Harmonic analysis and representations of semisimple

Lie group In mathematics, a Lie group (pronounced ) is a group (mathematics), group that is also a differentiable manifold, such that group multiplication and taking inverses are both differentiable. A manifold is a space that locally resembles Eucli ...

s'', (NATO Advanced Study Institute, Lüttich 1977), Reidel 1980 *''Principal series representations of direct limit groups'', Compositio Mathematica, v. 141 (2005), pp. 1504–1530. *''Complex forms of quaternionic symmetric spaces'', in ''Complex, contact and symmetric manifolds'', Progress in Mathematics 234, Birkhäuser 2005, pp. 265–277 *''Locally symmetric homogeneous spaces'', Comm. Math. Helvetici, volume 37, 1962, pp. 65–101 *''Self adjoint function spaces on Riemannian symmetric manifolds'', Transactions AMS, volume 113, 1964, pp. 299–315

References

External links

*
Homepage in Berkeley
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wolf, Joseph Albert 1936 births 2023 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Fellows of the American Mathematical Society University of Chicago alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Differential geometers Scientists from Chicago