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Meyer Jerison

mathematician

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ6826419
Source-derived summary

Meyer Jerison (November 28, 1922 – March 13, 1995) was an American mathematician who worked in functional analysis and ring theory, known for coauthoring the textbook Rings of Continuous Functions along with Leonard Gillman.

Jerison immigrated in 1929 from Poland to New York City, and was naturalized in 1933. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1943 from the City College of New York and a master's degree in applied math in 1947 from Brown University. In 1945, he married the former Miriam Schwartz. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1950 from the University of Michigan under Sumner Myers with a dissertation entitled "The Space of Bounded Maps Into a Banach Space."

Jerison worked briefly at NACA in Cleveland and at Lockheed Corporation. He joined the mathematics faculty at Purdue University in 1951, where he spent the remainder of his career, retiring in 1991.

Jerison is the father of David Jerison, a mathematics professor at MIT, and Michael Jerison, a professor of economics at SUNY Albany. His grandson Daniel Jerison is a professor of mathematics at the University of San Francisco, and his granddaughter Elizabeth Jerison is a professor of biophysics at the University of Chicago.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Meyer Jerison” is mathematician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Meyer, Jerison and mathematician, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1922, 1995, 1929, 1933—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1922-11-28. For this dossier, Meyer, Jerison and mathematician is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “mathematician” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6826419. VIAF identifies the subject as 71475824. The Library of Congress control number is n83826026. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1995, 1929 and 1933.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. 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

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

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  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Meyer Jerison primary sources, Meyer Jerison archive and Meyer research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Meyer Jerison” 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.