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Gilbert Ames Bliss | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1876-05-09)May 9, 1876 |
| Died | May 8, 1951(1951-05-08) (aged 74) Harvey, Illinois, US |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Known for | Calculus of variations |
| Awards | Chauvenet Prize (1925) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Chicago |
| Doctoral advisor | Oskar Bolza |
| Doctoral students | |
| Other notable students | Herman Goldstine |
Gilbert Ames Bliss, (May, 9 1876 – May 8, 1951), was an American mathematician, known for his work on thecalculus of variations.
Bliss grew up in a Chicago family that eventually became affluent; in 1907, his father became president of the company supplying all of Chicago's electricity. The family was not affluent, however, when Bliss entered theUniversity of Chicago in 1893 (its second year of operation). Hence he had to support himself while a student by winning a scholarship, and by playing in a student professionalmandolin quartet.
After obtaining the B.Sc. in 1897, he began graduate studies at Chicago in mathematical astronomy (his first publication was in that field), switching in 1898 to mathematics. He discovered his life's work, thecalculus of variations, via the lecture notes ofWeierstrass's 1879 course, andBolza's teaching. Bolza went on to supervise Bliss's Ph.D. thesis,The Geodesic Lines on the Anchor Ring, completed in 1900 and published in theAnnals of Mathematics in 1902. After two years as an instructor at theUniversity of Minnesota, Bliss spent the 1902–03 academic year at theUniversity of Göttingen, interacting withFelix Klein,David Hilbert,Hermann Minkowski,Ernst Zermelo,Erhard Schmidt,Max Abraham, andConstantin Carathéodory.
Upon returning to the United States, Bliss taught one year each at theUniversity of Chicago and theUniversity of Missouri. In 1904, he published two more papers on the calculus of variations in theTransactions of the American Mathematical Society. Bliss was a Preceptor atPrinceton University, 1905–08, joining a strong group of young mathematicians that includedLuther P. Eisenhart,Oswald Veblen, andRobert Lee Moore. While at Princeton he was also an associate editor of theAnnals of Mathematics.
In 1908, Chicago's Maschke died and Bliss was hired to replace him; Bliss remained at Chicago until his 1941 retirement. While at Chicago, he was an editor of theTransactions of the American Mathematical Society, 1908–16, and chaired the Mathematics Department, 1927–41. That Department was less distinguished under Bliss than it had been underE. H. Moore's previous leadership, and than it would become underMarshall Stone's andSaunders MacLane's direction afterWorld War II. A near-contemporary of Bliss's at Chicago was the algebraistLeonard Dickson.
DuringWorld War I, he worked onballistics, designing new firing tables for artillery, and lectured onnavigation. In 1918, he andOswald Veblen worked together in the Range Firing Section at theAberdeen Proving Ground, applying the calculus of variations to correct shell trajectories for the effects of wind, changes in air density, the rotation of the Earth, and other perturbations.
Bliss married Helen Hurd in 1912, who died in the 1918influenza pandemic; their two children survived. Bliss married Olive Hunter in 1920; they had no children.
Bliss was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences (United States) in 1916.[1] He was theAmerican Mathematical Society'sColloquium Lecturer (1909), Vice President (1911), and President (1921–22). He received theMathematical Association of America's firstChauvenet Prize, in 1925, for his article "Algebraic functions and their divisors,"[2] which culminated in his 1933 bookAlgebraic functions. He was also an elected member of theAmerican Philosophical Society and theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[3][4]
Bliss once headed a government commission that devised rules for apportioning seats in theU.S. House of Representatives among the several states.
Bliss's work on thecalculus of variations culminated in his classic 1946 monograph,Lectures on the Calculus of Variations, which treated the subject as an end in itself and not as an adjunct of mechanics. Here Bliss achieved a substantial simplification of the transformation theories ofClebsch andWeierstrass. Bliss also strengthened the necessary conditions ofEuler, Weierstrass,Legendre, andJacobi into sufficient conditions. Bliss set out the canonical formulation and solution of the problem ofBolza with side conditions and variable end-points. Bliss'sLectures more or less constitutes the culmination of the classic calculus of variations ofWeierstrass,Hilbert, andBolza. Subsequent work on variational problems would strike out in new directions, such asMorse theory,optimal control, anddynamic programming.
Bliss also studied singularities of real transformations in the plane.
