Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics is an academic department at McGill University. It is located in Burnside Hall at McGill's downtown campus in Montreal. Mathematics was taught at McGill as early as 1848 when it was a discipline of Natural Philosophy. Mathematics at McGill was initially divided into two largely independent departments, one under the Faculty of Arts and Science and another under the Faculty of Engineering; the two departments merged in 1924 under the chairmanship of Daniel Murray. Still, mathematics remained subsidiary to other programs, owing to McGill's emphasis on engineering and British-style applied mathematics. Until 1945, Mathematics was almost wholly a service department with only seven faculty members. Though a small graduate program was shared with the Physics Department, most of the students in the program were headed for further graduate work in physics. In 1945, department members Lloyd Williams and Gordon Pall founded the Canadian Mathematical Congress, which took the lead in persuading the National Research Council to make funds available for the support of pure mathematics. Meanwhile, as chairman of the department, A. H. S. Gillon initiated in 1945 an Applied Mathematics program and in 1948 recommended for appointment to a professorship Hans Zassenhaus, a pure mathematician who began to attract a number of strong graduate students into his program. Zassenhaus, along with Professors Wacław Kozakiewicz, Charles Fox, Edward Rosenthall, and Phil Wallace, was instrumental in developing the Department's Graduate School. McGill's first mathematics Ph.D. was awarded to Joachim Lambek, who obtained his doctorate in 1950 under Zassenhaus's supervision. In 1963, as public funds came to the university and a larger budget became available, the newly appointment chairman, Edward Rosenthall, concentrated on building a balanced and well-qualified academic team, which could sustain a vigorous graduate program along with the demands made upon the department in a service capacity.