Daniel Burrill Ray
American university teacher
Daniel Burrill Ray (5 February 1928, Cleveland, Ohio – 19 February 1979) was an American mathematician. He is known for Ray-Singer torsion.
Ray received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1949 from Harvard College and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1953 under Mark Kac with thesis On Spectra of Second Order Differential Operators. As a postdoc he was a Frank B. Jewett Fellow in 1953/54 at Bell Laboratories. From 1957 to 1979 he was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1961 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was a Sloan Fellow.
Selected publications
On spectra of second-order differential operators. Trans. Amer.
“Daniel Burrill Ray” enters the record as american university teacher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Daniel, Burrill and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Daniel Burrill Ray” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Daniel, Burrill and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18620249. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1979, 1949 and 1953.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Daniel Burrill Ray”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Daniel Burrill Ray primary sources, Daniel Burrill Ray archive and Daniel research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Daniel Burrill Ray”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Daniel Burrill Ray” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.