Harry Bernard Coonce (born 3/19/1938) 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]
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] and had just over 300,000 as of December 2023.
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.
He married Susan Schilling, a computer scientist who died in 2016. [5]
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 and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
Vladimir Alexandrovich Voevodsky was a Russian-American mathematician. His work in developing a homotopy theory for algebraic varieties and formulating motivic cohomology led to the award of a Fields Medal in 2002. He is also known for the proof of the Milnor conjecture and motivic Bloch–Kato conjectures and for the univalent foundations of mathematics and homotopy type theory.
Luitzen Egbertus Jan "Bertus" Brouwer was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. Regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, he is known as one of the founders of modern topology, particularly for establishing his fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.
Ludolph van Ceulen was a German-Dutch mathematician from Hildesheim. He immigrated to the Netherlands.
Mikio Sato was a Japanese mathematician known for founding the fields of algebraic analysis, hyperfunctions, and holonomic quantum fields. He was a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto.
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".
Lev Semyonovich Pontryagin was a Soviet mathematician. Completely blind from the age of 14, he made major discoveries in a number of fields of mathematics, including algebraic topology, differential topology and optimal control.
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.
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.
George Whitelaw Mackey was an American mathematician known for his contributions to quantum logic, representation theory, and noncommutative geometry.
Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld, surname also romanized as Drinfel'd, is a mathematician from the former USSR, who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the University of Chicago.
The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians. As of 1 December 2023, it contained information on 300,152 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.
Karl Hermann Amandus Schwarz was a German mathematician, known for his work in complex analysis.
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.
Herbert Saul Wilf was an American 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.
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.
Marshall Hall Jr. was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to group theory and combinatorics.
Paulo Ribenboim is a Brazilian-Canadian mathematician who specializes in number theory.
Otto Franz Georg Schilling was a German-American mathematician known as one of the leading algebraists of his time.