Biography:Albert Wilansky

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Albert "Tommy" Wilansky (13 September 1921, St. John's, Newfoundland – 3 July 2017, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) was a Canadian-American mathematician, known for introducing Smith numbers.[1][2]

Biography

Wilansky was educated as an undergraduate at Dalhousie University, where he received an M.A. in mathematics in 1944. From 1944 to 1947 he was a graduate student at Brown University.[3] In 1947 he received his Ph.D. with advisor Clarence Raymond Adams and dissertation An application of Banach linear functionals to the theory of summability.[4]

From 1948 until his official retirement in 1992, Wilansky was a faculty member of the mathematics department of Lehigh University.[3]

He was the university’s Distinguished Professor of Mathematics for the final 14 years of his tenure. During his 44 years at Lehigh he was a Fulbright visiting professor several times, at universities in Reading (1972–1973), London (1973), Tel Aviv (1981), and Berne (1981). Outside of academia he was a consultant for the Frankford Arsenal for the year 1957–1958.[3]

Wilansky did research in analysis, specializing in summability theory, linear topological spaces, Banach algebras, and functional analysis.[3] He was the author of several books and the author or co-author of more than 80 articles. He lectured at over 50 different universities.[2] In 1969 he received the Mathematical Association of America's Lester R. Ford Award for his 1968 article Spectral Decomposition of Matrices for High School Students.[5] (The 1969 award was also given individually to 5 other mathematicians.)

Wilansky was married to his first wife from 1947 until her death in 1969. They had two daughters. He had three step-daughters from his second marriage.

He was a professional musician for a brief time as a young man and continued playing piano and clarinet and writing songs, often with his wives and daughters.[2]

Selected publications

Articles

Books

References

  1. Wilansky, A. (1982). "Smith numbers". Two-Year College Mathematics Journal 13: 21. doi:10.2307/3026531. 
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Obituary. Albert Wilansky". The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania). July 11, 2017. https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/mcall/obituary.aspx?n=albert-wilansky&pid=186052058&fhid=6123. 
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Zitarelli, David E.. "EPADEL: A Sesquicentennial History, 1926–2000". https://www.personal.psu.edu/ecb5/EPaDel/Zittarelli/EPL0_Intro.html.  (See personal profile of Albert Wilansky in Chapter 6.)
  4. Albert "Tommy" Wilansky at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. "Spectral Decomposition of Matrices for High School Students". https://www.maa.org/programs/maa-awards/writing-awards/spectral-decomposition-of-matrices-for-high-school-students.  (with link to PDF of article, which was published in Mathematics Magazine )
  6. Stenger, Allen (October 10, 2009). "Review of Topology for analysis". https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/topology-for-analysis. 
  7. Retherford, James R. (1982). "Book Review: Locally convex spaces by H. Jarchow and Modern methods in topological vector spaces by Albert Wilansky". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 7 (3): 612–615. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1982-15069-8. ISSN 0273-0979. 
  8. Stenger, Allen (April 6, 2015). "Review of Modern Methods in Topological Vector Spaces". https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/modern-methods-in-topological-vector-spaces.