Leonard Mascot Blumenthal (February 27, 1901 – August 1984) was a Jewish American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

Career

He received his Ph.D. in 1927 from

Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

, under the supervision of

Frank Morley Frank Morley (September 9, 1860 – October 17, 1937) was a leading mathematician, known mostly for his teaching and research in the fields of algebra and geometry. Among his mathematical accomplishments was the discovery and proof of the celeb ...

; his dissertation was titled ''Lagrange Resolvents in Euclidean Geometry''. He taught for the majority of his professional career at the

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou or MU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri, United States. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus Univers ...

and was the author of ''A Modern View of Geometry''. He was a visiting scholar 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 ...

from 1933 to 1936. According to the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. it contained information on 300,152 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a typical mathematicia ...

, he had 18 Ph.D. students at Missouri, among them Leroy Milton Kelly and William Arthur Kirk; he is the academic ancestor of over 80 mathematicians..

Legacy

The Leonard M. Blumenthal Distinguished Professorship in Mathematics at the University of Missouri was established in 1992 in honor of Blumenthal. This

endowed chair A financial endowment is a legal structure for managing, and in many cases indefinitely perpetuating, a pool of financial, real estate, or other investments for a specific purpose according to the will of its founders and donors. Endowments are ...

is given on a five-year rotating basis to Missouri mathematics professors; the Blumenthal Professors at Missouri have included John Beem, Mark Ashbaugh, Alex Koldobsky, and Zhenbo Qin.Leonard M. Blumenthal Distinguished Professorship in Mathematics
,

Department of Mathematics. The American Mathematical Society also issued the

Blumenthal Award {{Short description, Award of the American Mathematical Society The Blumenthal Award was founded by the American Mathematical Society in 1993 in memory of Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal. The award was presented to the individual deemed to h ...

in his honor.

References

Works

* Blumenthal L.M. ''Theory and applications of

distance geometry Distance geometry is the branch of mathematics concerned with characterizing and studying sets of points based ''only'' on given values of the distances between pairs of points. More abstractly, it is the study of semimetric spaces and the isom ...

'' (1953), Oxford: At the Clarendon Press (Geoffrey Cumberlege), XI, 347 p. * Blumenthal L.M. ''Theory and applications of distance geometry'', (2nd edition, 1970), Bronx, New York: Chelsea Publishing Company. XI, 347 p., * Blumenthal L.M. ''A Modern View of Geometry'' (1961), W. H. Freeman & Co.; Dover edition (1980)

External links

* 1901 births 1984 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians Johns Hopkins University alumni Georgia Tech alumni University of Missouri faculty Rice University faculty Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Mathematicians from Missouri {{US-mathematician-stub