Hassler Whitney
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Hassler Whitney (23 March 1907 – 10 May 1989) was an American mathematician who was one of the founders of singularity theory, PhB, Yale University, 1928; MusB, 1929; ScD (Honorary), 1947; PhD, Harvard University, under G.D. Birkhoff, 1932.
Instructor, Mathamatics, Harvard University, 1930-31, 1933-35; NRC Fellow, Mathematics, 1931-33; Assistant Professor, 1935-40; Associate Professor, 1940-46, Professor, 1946-52; Professor Instructor, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton University, 1952-77; Professor Emeritus, 1977-89; Chairman of the Mathematics Panel, National Science Foundation, 1953-56; Exchange Professor, College de France, 1957; Memorial Committee, Support of Research in Mathematical Scienes, National Research Council, 1966-67; President, International Commission of Mathematical Instruction, 1979-82; Research Mathematicians, National Defense Research Committee, 1943-45; Construction of the School of Mathematics. Recipient, National Medal of Science, 1976, Wolf Prize, Wolf Foundation, 1983; and a Steele Prize in 1985.
Member, National Academy of Science; Colloquium Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 1946; Vice President, 1948-50 and Editor, American Journal of Mathematics, 1944-49; Editor, Mathematical Revs., 1949-54; Chairman of the Committee vis. lectureship, 1946-51; Committee Summer Instructor, 1953-54; Steele Prize 1985), Mathematical Association; American National Council Teachers of Mathematics, Swiss Mathematics Society (Honorary), Académie des Sciences, (Foreign Associate); New York Academy of Sciences.
Club: American Alpine (New York City).
In 1935 Whitney proved that any differential manifold of dimension n may be embedded in R2n, and immersed in R2n-1. This basic result shows that manifolds may be treated intrinsically or extrinsically, as we wish. The intrinsic definition had only been published a few years earlier in the work of Oswald Veblen and J.H.C. Whitehead. These theorems opened the way for much more refined studies: of embedding, immersion and also of smoothing, that is, the possibility of having various smooth structures on a given topological manifold. The argument of Whitney is necessarily of general position type.
A few years later, Whitney wrote the foundational paper on matroids. This is apparently a chapter of combinatorics; it has in recent years been seen increasingly as related to the fine structure of Grassmannians. In fact the idea of stratification, used for that application and many others, was also introduced by Whitney, in a precise form (his conditions A and B).
The singularities in low dimension of smooth mappings, later to come to prominence in the work of Thom, were also first studied by Whitney.
His book Geometric Integration Theory gives a theoretical basis for Stokes' theorem applied with singularities on the boundary.
These aspects of Whitney’s work have looked more unified, in retrospect and with the general development of singularity theory in its aspect of the failure of smoothness. Whitney’s purely topological work (Stiefel-Whitney class, basic results on vector bundles) entered the mainstream more quickly.
WHITNEY-NEWCOMB-BALDWIN
Hassler Whitney was the son of New York Supreme Court Justice Edward Baldwin Whitney and Josepha (Newcomb) Whitney, and the grandson of Yale University Professor of Ancient Languages William Dwight Whitney and Connecticut Governor and US Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, and the great-great-grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman.
Hassler Whitney's maternal grandparents were professor & astronomer Simon Newcomb and Mary Hassler Newcomb (the granddaughter of the first superintendent of the Coast Survey - Ferdinand Hassler).
Married Margaret R. Howell, May 30, 1930; children: James Newcomb, Carol, Marian; married Mary Barnett Garfield, January 16, 1955; children: Sarah Newcomb, Emily Baldwin; and married Barbara Floyd Osterman, February 8, 1986.
See also
Hassler Whitney Page - Whitney Research Group - http://www.whitneygen.org/archives/biography/hassler.html
