Harry Coonce

Last updated

Harry Bernard Coonce (born 1939) is an American mathematician notable for being the originator of the now-popular Mathematics Genealogy Project, launched in 1996, a web-based catalog of mathematics doctoral advisors and students. [1]

Contents

Coonce conceived of the idea while reading the unsigned thesis of his academic advisor Malcolm Robertson, in the Princeton University library, and wondering who his advisor's advisor was. The amount of time it took Coonce, without the existence of a central database of such information, to find out that Robertson's advisor was C. Einar Hille, gave him the idea for the project. In a 2000 interview, Coonce estimated that the project would top out at about 80,000 entries. [2] In June 2016, the number of entries surpassed 200,000. [3]

Education

Coonce completed his PhD in 1969 at the University of Delaware with a dissertation on A Variational Method for Functions of Bounded Boundary Rotation. [4] Coonce presently is a retired mathematics professor of Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Private life

He married Susan Schilling, a computer scientist who died in 2016. [5]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Wiles</span> British mathematician who proved Fermats Last Theorem

Sir Andrew John Wiles is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal by the Royal Society. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and in 2018, was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ludolph van Ceulen</span>

Ludolph van Ceulen was a German-Dutch mathematician from Hildesheim. He emigrated to the Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Bateman</span> British-American mathematician

Harry Bateman FRS was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics. With Ebenezer Cunningham, he expanded the views of spacetime symmetry of Lorentz and Poincare to a more expansive conformal group of spacetime leaving Maxwell's equations invariant. Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology. There he taught fluid dynamics to students going into aerodynamics with Theodore von Karman. Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in his Gibbs Lecture in 1943 titled, "The control of an elastic fluid".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Erdős</span> Hungarian mathematician (1913–1996)

Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. Erdős pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. He championed and contributed to Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions in which order necessarily appears. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erhard Schmidt</span> Baltic German mathematician

Erhard Schmidt was a Baltic German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century. Schmidt was born in Tartu, in the Governorate of Livonia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herman Goldstine</span> American mathematician (1913–2004)

Herman Heine Goldstine was a mathematician and computer scientist, who worked as the director of the IAS machine at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study and helped to develop ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers. He subsequently worked for many years at IBM as an IBM Fellow, the company's most prestigious technical position.

The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians. As of 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a typical mathematician, the project entry includes graduation year, thesis title, alma mater, doctoral advisor, and doctoral students.

George Neil Robertson is a mathematician working mainly in topological graph theory, currently a distinguished professor emeritus at the Ohio State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Øystein Ore</span> Norwegian mathematician

Øystein Ore was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in ring theory, Galois connections, graph theory, and the history of mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hermann Schwarz</span> German mathematician

Karl Hermann Amandus Schwarz was a German mathematician, known for his work in complex analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Andrews (mathematician)</span> American mathematician

George Eyre Andrews is an American mathematician working in special functions, number theory, analysis and combinatorics.

Harry Schultz Vandiver was an American mathematician, known for work in number theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herbert Wilf</span> American mathematician

Herbert Saul Wilf was a mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. He was the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote numerous books and research papers. Together with Neil Calkin he founded The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics in 1994 and was its editor-in-chief until 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hillel Furstenberg</span> American-Israeli mathematician

Hillel "Harry" Furstenberg is a German-born American-Israeli mathematician and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Abel Prize and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marshall Hall (mathematician)</span> American mathematician

Marshall Hall Jr. was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to group theory and combinatorics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paulo Ribenboim</span> Brazilian-Canadian mathematician

Paulo Ribenboim is a Brazilian-Canadian mathematician who specializes in number theory.

K C Sreedharan Pillai (1920–1985) was an Indian statistician who was known for his works on multivariate analysis and probability distributions.

Edmund Frederick Robertson is a professor emeritus of pure mathematics at the University of St Andrews.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Mazur</span> American mathematician

Barry Charles Mazur is an American mathematician and the Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University. His contributions to mathematics include his contributions to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, Mazur's torsion theorem in arithmetic geometry, the Mazur swindle in geometric topology, and the Mazur manifold in differential topology.

Otto Franz Georg Schilling was a German-American mathematician known as one of the leading algebraists of his time.

References

  1. Jackson, Allyn (2007), "A labor of love: the Mathematics Genealogy Project" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society , 54 (8): 1002–1003.
  2. Brindley, David. (2000). “Genealogy: a Family You Can Count On”, Prism Magazine, Jan.
  3. Mathematics Genealogy Project: Number of records 14 November 2016
  4. Harry Bernand Coonce – Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  5. "Obituary - Susan M. Schilling". www.mankatomortuary.com. Retrieved Aug 20, 2023.