CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · People & Ideas

Walter Craig (mathematician)

Canadian mathematician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ28785208 ↗
Source-derived summary

Walter L. Craig (1953 – January 18, 2019) was a United States born Canadian mathematician and a Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Analysis and Applications at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

Personal life

Craig was born in State College, Pennsylvania in 1953. His father, a professor at Pennsylvania State University transferred to University of California, Berkeley, where Craig and his siblings were raised starting in 1959.

Craig was the son of the logician William Craig and the husband of mathematician Deirdre Haskell.

Education

Craig attended the University of California at Berkeley and, after spending two years performing as a jazz musician, returned there to graduate with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1977. Craig earned his Ph.D. from New York University - Courant Institute in 1981; his dissertation, A Bifurcation Theory for Periodic Dissipative Wave Equations, was supervised by Louis Nirenberg.

Career

After stints at the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Brown University, Craig moved to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 2000. His research topics included nonlinear partial differential equations, infinite dimensional Hamiltonian systems, Schrödinger operators and spectral theory, water waves, general relativity, and cosmology.

In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; he was awarded a Killam Fellowship in 2009.

In 2013, he became one of the inaugural Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Walter Craig (mathematician)” is canadian mathematician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Walter, Craig 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—1953, 2019, 1959, 1977—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1953. For this dossier, Walter, Craig and mathematician is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “canadian 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 Mar 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28785208. VIAF identifies the subject as 220111880. The Library of Congress control number is n2018046076. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 2019, 1959 and 1977.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. 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.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Walter Craig (mathematician)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Walter Craig (mathematician) primary sources, Walter Craig (mathematician) archive and Walter 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

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Walter Craig (mathematician)”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Walter Craig (mathematician)” 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.