Leonard Gillman | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1917-01-08)January 8, 1917 Cleveland, Ohio, US |
| Died | April 7, 2009(2009-04-07) (aged 92) Austin, Texas, US |
| Alma mater | Juilliard Graduate School of Music,Columbia University |
| Known for | Topology |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematician,pianist |
| Institutions | Purdue University,University of Rochester,University of Texas at Austin |
| Doctoral advisor | Edgar Lorch Alfred Tarski |
Leonard E. Gillman (January 8, 1917 – April 7, 2009) was an Americanmathematician,emeritus professor at theUniversity of Texas at Austin. He was also an accomplished classicalpianist.
Gillman was born inCleveland, Ohio in 1917. His family moved toPittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1922. It was there that he started takingpiano lessons at age six. They moved toNew York City in 1926, and he began intensive training as a pianist. Upon graduation fromhigh school in 1933, Gillman won afellowship to theJuilliard Graduate School of Music.
After one semester at Juilliard, he enrolled in evening classes inFrench andmathematics atColumbia University. He received a diploma in piano from Juilliard in 1938, then continued his studies at Columbia, graduating with aB.S. in mathematics in 1941. He stayed on as a graduate student, and completed thecoursework for a mathematicsPh.D. by 1943.
In 1943, Gillman accepted a position atTufts College, working on a special project for theNavy Department. While there he wrote athesis based on their work onpursuit curves, and he received hismaster's degree from Columbia in 1945. He moved toWashington, D.C. where he continued doing Navy work for the Operations Evaluation Group (OEG), affiliated with theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. After five years he took a one-yearsabbatical at MIT to write a doctoral thesis. Originally he intended for it to be ongame theory, but he happened to read a book byWacław Sierpiński and became suddenly interested inset theory. With no specialists to advise him, Gillman wrote and published a paper that became his thesis: "On Intervals of Ordered Sets". He also sent the paper toAlfred Tarski, beginning a correspondence that led Tarski to claim Gillman as "my Ph.D. by mail".[1] In 1952, Gillman accepted an instructorship atPurdue University, and in 1953 he finally received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia.[2]
At Purdue, he began to do research intopology, in collaboration withMelvin Henriksen,Meyer Jerison, and others. This work concentrated on thering of allreal-valuedcontinuous functions whosedomain is a giventopological space. They explored the relationships between topological properties of the space and algebraic properties of the ring. Gillman and Henriksen defined and characterized the classes ofP-spaces and F-spaces, and Gillman and Jerison published an entire textbook on the subject:Rings of Continuous Functions,ISBN 0-387-90198-1.
In 1958, Gillman was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship,[3] and he spent the next two years as a visiting member at theInstitute for Advanced Study. He and former OEG colleagueNathan Fine definedremote points and showed that if thecontinuum hypothesis holds, then thereal line (or anyseparableTychonoff space that is notpseudocompact) has remote points.
In 1960, he became chairman of the department of mathematics at theUniversity of Rochester. He was active in recruiting top mathematicians to the department, includingArthur Harold Stone and his wifeDorothy Maharam. At Rochester, Gillman also became involved in activities of theMathematical Association of America (MAA). In 1969 he was appointed a regional Associate Secretary of theAmerican Mathematical Society, but he had to give it up after moving to the University of Texas that same year. He chaired the UT mathematics department until 1973, when he was electedTreasurer of the MAA. He held this office for 13 years. Gillman retired from UT in 1987 and served as President of the MAA for the term 1987–1988.[4] Leonard Gillman received aLester R. Ford Award in 1994[5] and again in 2003.[6]
Gillman was involved in localclassical music everywhere he worked, and performed four times at theJoint Mathematics Meeting, twice withWilliam Browder. Gillman died on April 7, 2009[7] inAustin, Texas.[8]
