John B. Conway

Not to be confused with John B. Conaway.

For other people named John Conway, see John Conway (disambiguation).

John B. Conway
Born	(1939-09-22)September 22, 1939 New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Died	February 17, 2024(2024-02-17) (aged 84)
Alma mater	Loyola University (BS) Louisiana State University (PhD)
Known for	Complex analysis Operator algebra
Spouse	Ann Conway
Children	1
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	The George Washington University
Thesis	The Strict Topology and Compactness in the Space of Measures  (1966)
Doctoral advisor	Heron S. Collins [1]
Doctoral students	Jim Agler (1980) [1]

John Bligh Conway (September 22, 1939 - February 17, 2024 ^[2] ) was an American mathematician. He was a professor at the George Washington University, officially retiring in 2011 and continuing as a professor emeritus until his death in 2024. He specialized in functional analysis, particularly bounded operators on Hilbert spaces.

Conway earned his Bachelor of Science from Loyola University and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University under the direction of Heron Collins in 1965, with a dissertation on The Strict Topology and Compactness in the Space of Measures. ^[3] He had 20 students who obtained doctorates under his supervision, most of them at Indiana University, where he was a close friend of mathematician Max Zorn. He served on the faculty there from 1965 to 1990, when he became head of the mathematics department at the University of Tennessee.

He was the author of a two-volume series on Functions of One Complex Variable (Springer-Verlag), which is a standard graduate text for courses on complex analysis. He also wrote texts on operator algebras, including a general text on the subject titled A Course in Operator Theory (American Mathematical Society) and two texts on his specialty of subnormal operators, titled The Theory of Subnormal Operators (American Mathematical Society) and Subnormal Operators (Pitman Books Ltd.) respectively.

Selected publications

• Conway, John B. (1978). Functions of One Complex Variable I (Graduate Texts in Mathematics 11). Springer-Verlag. ISBN   978-0-387-90328-6.
• Conway, John (1990). A course in functional analysis. Graduate Texts in Mathematics. Vol. 96 (2nd ed.). New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN   978-0-387-97245-9. OCLC   21195908.
• Conway, John B. (1999). A Course in Operator Theory (Graduate Studies in Mathematics 21). American Mathematical Society. ISBN   978-0-8218-2065-0.
• Conway, John B. (1996). On Being a Department Head: A Personal View. American Mathematical Society. ISBN   978-0-8218-0615-9.
• Conway, John B. (1991). The Theory of Subnormal Operators. American Mathematical Society. ISBN   978-0-8218-1536-6. ^[4]
• Conway, John B. (1981). Subnormal Operators. Pitman Books Ltd. ISBN   978-0-8218-2184-8. ^[5]
• Conway, John B. (1973). "A complete Boolean algebra of subspaces which is not reflexive". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 79 (4): 720–722. doi: 10.1090/S0002-9904-1973-13279-3 .

References

1. John B. Conway at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
2. Baginski, Frank E.; Li, Wing Suet; Stephenson, Kenneth (November 2025). "In Memoriam: John Bligh Conway (1939-2024)". www.ams.org. American Mathematical Society. doi:10.1090/noti3241 . Retrieved 2025-12-17.
3. Conway, John (1967). "The Strict Topology and Compactness in the space of Measures". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 126 (3): 474–486. doi: 10.1090/S0002-9947-1967-0206685-2 . JSTOR   1994310.
4. Gamelin, T. W. (1993). "Review: The theory of subnormal operators, by John B. Conway". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 28 (1): 199–202. doi: 10.1090/s0273-0979-1993-00355-0 .
5. Muhly, Paul S. (1983). "Review: Subnormal operators, by John B. Conway". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 8 (3): 511–515. doi: 10.1090/s0273-0979-1983-15144-3 .

External links

• Official website
• John B. Conway at the Mathematics Genealogy Project