Robert S. Doran

Last updated
Robert S. Doran
Robert S. Doran.jpg
Born (1937-12-21) December 21, 1937 (age 85)
Winthrop, Iowa
Alma mater University of Iowa
University of Washington
Scientific career
FieldsOperator Algebras
Functional Analysis
Institutions Texas Christian University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Oxford
Institute for Advanced Study
Doctoral advisors J. M. G. Fell
Ramesh Gangolli

Robert Stuart Doran (born December 21, 1937) is an American mathematician. He held the John William and Helen Stubbs Potter Professorship in mathematics at Texas Christian University (TCU) from 1995 until his retirement in 2016. Doran served as chair of the TCU mathematics department for 21 years. [1] He has also held visiting appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Study. He was elected to the board of trustees of the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study, serving as president of the organization for 10 years. [2] [3] He has been an editor for the Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, Cambridge University Press, a position he has held since 1988. [4] Doran is known for his research-level books, his award-winning teaching, and for his solution to a long-standing open problem due to Irving Kaplansky on a symmetric *-algebra. [5]

Contents

Personal background

Robert Stuart Doran was born on December 21, 1937, in Winthrop, Iowa. [6] In 1959, he married Shirley Ann Lange. They have two sons, Bruce and Brad.

Military service

In 1956, Doran served in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He served as a Special Forces Instructor at the US Army Jungle Survival Center at Fort Sherman, Colón, Panama. [7] He left active duty in the military in 1958 and he served in the US Army reserves until 1962 when he was honorably discharged.

Educational background

Doran studied mathematics at the University of Iowa from 1959 until 1964, earning a Bachelor's degree and a Master of Science degree. He received a Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1968, under the direction of J. M. G. Fell and Ramesh Gangolli. [8] His doctoral dissertation, [9] [10] titled Representations of C*-algebras by Uniform CT-bundles and Operator Theory, dealt with topological representations in spaces of cross-sections of fiber bundles of a non-commutative C*-algebra. This work was motivated in part by the classical Gelfand–Naimark theorem for C*-algebras and by the work of M. Takesaki and J. Tomiyama. [11] [12]

Professional background

Doran held the John William and Helen Stubbs Potter Professor of Mathematics at Texas Christian University from 1995 to 2016. He was faculty sponsor of the TCU chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru) for 43 years, and he was the founding faculty sponsor in 1989 of the TCU chapter of Brothers Under Christ (Beta Upsilon Chi).

He has held visiting appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1980), Oxford University in England (1988), and the Institute for Advanced Study (1981). [13] His areas of research involve representation theory, C*-algebra characterizations, the notion of an approximate identity in a Banach algebra, and Banach bundle theory. [14] [15]

Doran taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1988 he published an article titled "A care package for undergraduate mathematics students" that outlined his teaching methods. [16] He has received national, statewide, and local awards for his teaching. [17] [18]

Doran was chair of the TCU Mathematics Department for 21 years (1990–2011). In 1986 he was elected to the board of trustees the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study. [13] He was president of the association for 10 years (1990-1999). Doran has been an editor for Cambridge University Press since 1988. [19] He has also organized many American Mathematical Society special sessions and conferences for CBMS, the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. His first such conference was held at TCU in 1970 with Paul Halmos as principal speaker. [20] The most recent conference was held at TCU, June 2011 with Phillip Griffiths, former Director of the Institute for Advanced Study as principal speaker.

Doran is known for his elegant solution [21] of a long-standing unsolved problem on a symmetric *-algebra left open by Irving Kaplansky in the Duke Mathematical Journal in 1949. [22]

Published works

Doran has published books, articles, and reviews on a variety of topics, often collaborating with other mathematicians, including J. M. G. Fell, Richard Kadison, Calvin Moore, Jonathan Rosenberg, Paul Sally, Robert Zimmer, and V. S. Varadarajan.

Books

In addition to research articles and books, Doran has published over 540 reviews for the Mathematical Reviews. [24]

Honors and awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Pierre Serre</span> French mathematician

Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003.

In functional analysis, a discipline within mathematics, given a C*-algebra A, the Gelfand–Naimark–Segal construction establishes a correspondence between cyclic *-representations of A and certain linear functionals on A. The correspondence is shown by an explicit construction of the *-representation from the state. It is named for Israel Gelfand, Mark Naimark, and Irving Segal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Israel Gelfand</span> Soviet mathematician

Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, also written Israïl Moyseyovich Gel'fand, or Izrail M. Gelfand was a prominent Soviet-American mathematician. He made significant contributions to many branches of mathematics, including group theory, representation theory and functional analysis. The recipient of many awards, including the Order of Lenin and the first Wolf Prize, he was a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society and professor at Moscow State University and, after immigrating to the United States shortly before his 76th birthday, at Rutgers University. Gelfand is also a 1994 MacArthur Fellow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Armand Borel</span> Swiss mathematician

Armand Borel was a Swiss mathematician, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and was a permanent professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States from 1957 to 1993. He worked in algebraic topology, in the theory of Lie groups, and was one of the creators of the contemporary theory of linear algebraic groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Brauer</span> German-American mathematician

Richard Dagobert Brauer was a leading German and American mathematician. He worked mainly in abstract algebra, but made important contributions to number theory. He was the founder of modular representation theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kunihiko Kodaira</span> Japanese mathematician

Kunihiko Kodaira was a Japanese mathematician known for distinguished work in algebraic geometry and the theory of complex manifolds, and as the founder of the Japanese school of algebraic geometers. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1954, being the first Japanese national to receive this honour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Mackey</span>

George Whitelaw Mackey was an American mathematician known for his contributions to quantum logic, representation theory, and noncommutative geometry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garrett Birkhoff</span> American mathematician (1911–1996)

Garrett Birkhoff was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work in lattice theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bertram Kostant</span> American Jewish mathematician

Bertram Kostant was an American mathematician who worked in representation theory, differential geometry, and mathematical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phillip Griffiths</span> American mathematician

Phillip Augustus Griffiths IV is an American mathematician, known for his work in the field of geometry, and in particular for the complex manifold approach to algebraic geometry. He is a major developer in particular of the theory of variation of Hodge structure in Hodge theory and moduli theory, which forms part of transcendental algebraic geometry and which also touches upon major and distant areas of differential geometry. He also worked on partial differential equations, coauthored with Shiing-Shen Chern, Robert Bryant and Robert Gardner on Exterior Differential Systems.

The mathematician Irving Kaplansky is notable for proposing numerous conjectures in several branches of mathematics, including a list of ten conjectures on Hopf algebras. They are usually known as Kaplansky's conjectures.

Victor Gershevich (Grigorievich) Kac is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He co-discovered Kac–Moody algebras, and used the Weyl–Kac character formula for them to reprove the Macdonald identities. He classified the finite-dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra. He is also known for the Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures with Boris Weisfeiler.

In mathematics, the Langlands classification is a description of the irreducible representations of a reductive Lie group G, suggested by Robert Langlands (1973). There are two slightly different versions of the Langlands classification. One of these describes the irreducible admissible (g,K)-modules, for g a Lie algebra of a reductive Lie group G, with maximal compact subgroup K, in terms of tempered representations of smaller groups. The tempered representations were in turn classified by Anthony Knapp and Gregg Zuckerman. The other version of the Langlands classification divides the irreducible representations into L-packets, and classifies the L-packets in terms of certain homomorphisms of the Weil group of R or C into the Langlands dual group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernest Vinberg</span> Russian mathematician (1937–2020)

Ernest Borisovich Vinberg was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, who worked on Lie groups and algebraic groups, discrete subgroups of Lie groups, invariant theory, and representation theory. He introduced Vinberg's algorithm and the Koecher–Vinberg theorem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilles Pisier</span> French mathematician

Gilles I. Pisier is a professor of mathematics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a distinguished professor and A.G. and M.E. Owen Chair of Mathematics at the Texas A&M University. He is known for his contributions to several fields of mathematics, including functional analysis, probability theory, harmonic analysis, and operator theory. He has also made fundamental contributions to the theory of C*-algebras. Gilles is the younger brother of French actress Marie-France Pisier.

In mathematics, Banach algebra cohomology of a Banach algebra with coefficients in a bimodule is a cohomology theory defined in a similar way to Hochschild cohomology of an abstract algebra, except that one takes the topology into account so that all cochains and so on are continuous.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgia Benkart</span> American mathematician (1947–2022)

Georgia McClure Benkart was an American mathematician who was known for her work in the structure and representation theory of Lie algebras and related algebraic structures. She published over 130 journal articles and co-authored three American Mathematical Society memoirs in four broad categories: modular Lie algebras; combinatorics of Lie algebra representations; graded algebras and superalgebras; and quantum groups and related structures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William G. Bade</span> American mathematician

William George Bade was an American mathematician, who did his most significant work on Banach algebras.

James Michael Gardner Fell was a Canadian-American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis and representation theory. He is known for Fell bundles. He was an accomplished linguist who knew Sanskrit, Icelandic, German, French, Russian, Greek, and Latin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dmitry Fuchs</span> Russian-American mathematician

Dmitry Borisovich Fuchs is a Russian-American mathematician, specializing in the representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie groups and in topology.

References

  1. "Doran Selected for Potter Mathematics Professorship". The Next Frontier Magazine of Texas Christian University. 21 (3): 4. Summer 1995.
  2. "Mathematician named trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study". Texas Christian University: Research Bulletin: 7–8. Fall 1986.
  3. "Community of Scholars". 9 December 2019.
  4. Cambridge Core. "Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications." Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/series/encyclopedia-of-mathematics-and-its-applications/14161A9F36D6D0C9A650A4F86F74162D
  5. Doran, Robert (1972). "A Generalization of a theorem of Civin and Yood". Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society. 4: 25–26. doi:10.1112/blms/4.1.25.
  6. "Winthrop." MapSof.net. https://www.mapsof.net/winthrop-ia
  7. 1 2 Andersen, Nancy (October 1986). "A Formula For More Than Math". Image Magazine: 12–13.
  8. "Robert Doran - the Mathematics Genealogy Project".
  9. Doran, Robert (1968). "Construction of uniform CT-bundles". Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 15: 551.
  10. Doran, Robert (1968). Representations of C*-algebras by Uniform CT bundles and Operator theory. University of Washington.
  11. Tomiyama, J.; M. Takesaki (1961). "Applications of fiber bundles to a certain class of C*-algebras". Tohoku Math J. 13: 498–523. doi: 10.2748/tmj/1178244253 .
  12. Tomiyama, J. (1962). "Topological representation of C*-algebras". Tohoku Math J. 14: 182–204. doi: 10.2748/tmj/1178244174 .
  13. 1 2 "Mathematician named trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study". Texas Christian University: Research Bulletin: 7–8. 1986.
  14. Rieffel, Marc (February 1990). "Reviews". The American Mathematical Monthly. 97 (2): 167–170. doi:10.2307/2323935. JSTOR   2323935.
  15. Williams, Dana (1989). "Review: Representations of *-algebras, locally compact groups, and Banach *-algebraic bundles". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 21 (2): 311–314. doi: 10.1090/s0273-0979-1989-15840-0 .
  16. Doran, Robert (1988). "A Care Package for Undergraduate Mathematics Students". Mathematics in College: 32–37.
  17. "National Teaching Awards to Mathematicians". Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 37 (1): 27. 1990.
  18. "Past Recipients of the Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics Award". MAA Texas.
  19. "Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications". Cambridge University Press.
  20. Halmos, P. R. (1970). "Ten problems in Hilbert space". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 76 (5): 887–933. doi: 10.1090/s0002-9904-1970-12502-2 .
  21. Doran, R. S. (1972). "A generalization of a theorem of Civin and Yood". Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society. 4: 25–26. doi:10.1112/blms/4.1.25.
  22. Kaplansky, I. (1949). "Normed algebras". Duke Mathematical Journal. 16 (3): 399–418. doi:10.1215/s0012-7094-49-01640-3.
  23. 1 2 Williams, Dana P. (1989). "Review of Representations of *-algebras, locally compact groups, and Banach *-algebraic bundles, by J. M. G. Fell and R. S. Doran. vol. 1, Basic representation theory of groups and algebras; vol. 2, Banach *-algebraic bundles, induced representations, and the generalized Mackey analysis" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 21 (2): 311–314. doi: 10.1090/s0273-0979-1989-15840-0 .
  24. MATHSCINET
  25. Whitaker, Melissa (October 1989). "Math Professor's Style Total Success". TCU Daily Skiff.
  26. 1 2 "National Teaching Awards to Mathematicians". Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 37 (1). January 1990.
  27. Dean, R. G. (1995). A seventy-five year history of the Texas section of the Mathematical Association of America 1920-1995. Abilene: Conley Printing Company. pp. 165–168. ISBN   0964525100.
  28. Dean, R. G. (1995). A seventy-five year history of the Texas section of the Mathematical Association of America 1920-1995. Conley Printing Company. pp. 165–168. ISBN   0964525100.
  29. "Doran is Piper Professor for 1989". Texas Christian University Weekly. 65 (32). May 1989.
  30. "Foundation Agrees: Doran is Superior". This is TCU Magazine. 32 (2): 5. May 1989.
  31. "Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Teaching". This is TCU Magazine. 31 (4): 4. December 1988.