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Paul Halmos
Summary
Paul Richard Halmos (Halmos Pál; March 3, 1916 – October 2, 2006) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and statistician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis (in particular, Hilbert spaces). He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. He has been described as one of The Martians.
Born in Hungary into a Jewish family, Halmos arrived in the U.S. at 13 years of age. He obtained his B.A. from the University of Illinois, majoring in mathematics, but fulfilling the requirements for both a math and philosophy degree. He took only three years to obtain the degree, and was only 19 when he graduated. He then began a Ph.D. in philosophy, still at the Champaign–Urbana campus; but, after failing his masters' oral exams, he shifted to mathematics, graduating in 1938. Joseph L. Doob supervised his dissertation, titled Invariants of Certain Stochastic Transformations: The Mathematical Theory of Gambling Systems.
Shortly after his graduation, Halmos left for the Institute for Advanced Study, lacking both job and grant money. Six months later, he was working under John von Neumann, which proved a decisive experience. While at the Institute, Halmos wrote his first book, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces, which immediately established his reputation as a fine expositor of mathematics.
From 1967 to 1968 he was the Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin.
Halmos taught at Syracuse University, the University of Chicago (1946–60), the University of Michigan (~1961–67), the University of Hawaii (1967–68), Indiana University (1969–85), and the University of California at Santa Barbara (1976–78). From his 1985 retirement from Indiana until his death, he was affiliated with the Mathematics department at Santa Clara University (1985–2006).
In a series of papers reprinted in his 1962 Algebraic Logic, Halmos devised polyadic algebras, an algebraic version of first-order logic differing from the better known cylindric algebras of Alfred Tarski and his students.
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