Ralph P. Boas Jr.
American mathematician (1912–1992)
Ralph Philip Boas Jr. (August 8, 1912 – July 25, 1992) was a mathematician, teacher, and journal editor. He wrote over 200 papers, mainly in the fields of real and complex analysis.
Biography
He was born in Walla Walla, Washington, the son of an English professor at Whitman College, but moved frequently as a child; his younger sister, Marie Boas Hall, later to become a historian of science, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father had become a high school teacher. He was home-schooled until the age of eight, began his formal schooling in the sixth grade, and graduated from high school while still only 15. After a gap year auditing classes at Mount Holyoke College (where his father had become a professor) he entered Harvard, intending to major in chemistry and go into medicine, but ended up studying mathematics instead. His first mathematics publication was written as an undergraduate, after he discovered an incorrect proof in another paper. He got his A.B. degree in 1933, received a Sheldon Fellowship for a year of travel, and returned to Harvard for his doctoral studies in 1934. He earned his doctorate there in 1937, under the supervision of David Widder.
After postdoctoral studies at Princeton University with Salomon Bochner, and then the University of Cambridge in England, he began a two-year instructorship at Duke University, where he met his future wife, Mary Layne, also a mathematics instructor at Duke.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ralph P. Boas Jr.” 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.