Gilbert Ames Bliss
- Lloyd Dines
- Magnus Hestenes
- A. S. Householder
- Mary Landers
- Gillie Larew
- Edward McShane
- D. M. Smith
- Marion E. Stark
- James H. Taylor
- Marion Ballantyne White
- Evelyn Prescott Wiggin
Gilbert Ames Bliss, (May, 9 1876 – May 8, 1951), was an American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations.
Life
Bliss grew up in a Chicago family that eventually became affluent; in 1907, his father became president of the company supplying all of Chicago's electricity. The family was not affluent, however, when Bliss entered the University of Chicago in 1893 (its second year of operation). Hence he had to support himself while a student by winning a scholarship, and by playing in a student professional mandolin quartet.
After obtaining the B.Sc. in 1897, he began graduate studies at Chicago in mathematical astronomy (his first publication was in that field), switching in 1898 to mathematics. He discovered his life's work, the calculus of variations, via the lecture notes of Weierstrass's 1879 course, and Bolza's teaching. Bolza went on to supervise Bliss's Ph.D. thesis, The Geodesic Lines on the Anchor Ring, completed in 1900 and published in the Annals of Mathematics in 1902. After two years as an instructor at the University of Minnesota, Bliss spent the 1902–03 academic year at the University of Göttingen, interacting with Felix Klein, David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski, Ernst Zermelo, Erhard Schmidt, Max Abraham, and Constantin Carathéodory.
Upon returning to the United States, Bliss taught one year each at the University of Chicago and the University of Missouri. In 1904, he published two more papers on the calculus of variations in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Bliss was a Preceptor at Princeton University, 1905–08, joining a strong group of young mathematicians that included Luther P. Eisenhart, Oswald Veblen, and Robert Lee Moore. While at Princeton he was also an associate editor of the Annals of Mathematics.
In 1908, Chicago's Maschke died and Bliss was hired to replace him; Bliss remained at Chicago until his 1941 retirement. While at Chicago, he was an editor of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 1908–16, and chaired the Mathematics Department, 1927–41. That Department was less distinguished under Bliss than it had been under E. H. Moore's previous leadership, and than it would become under Marshall Stone's and Saunders MacLane's direction after World War II. A near-contemporary of Bliss's at Chicago was the algebraist Leonard Dickson.
During World War I, he worked on ballistics, designing new firing tables for artillery, and lectured on navigation. In 1918, he and Oswald Veblen worked together in the Range Firing Section at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, applying the calculus of variations to correct shell trajectories for the effects of wind, changes in air density, the rotation of the Earth, and other perturbations.
Bliss married Helen Hurd in 1912, who died in the 1918 influenza pandemic; their two children survived. Bliss married Olive Hunter in 1920; they had no children.
Bliss was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (United States) in 1916.[1] He was the American Mathematical Society's Colloquium Lecturer (1909), Vice President (1911), and President (1921–22). He received the Mathematical Association of America's first Chauvenet Prize, in 1925, for his article "Algebraic functions and their divisors,"[2] which culminated in his 1933 book Algebraic functions. He was also an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[3][4]
Bliss once headed a government commission that devised rules for apportioning seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the several states.
Work
Bliss's work on the calculus of variations culminated in his classic 1946 monograph, Lectures on the Calculus of Variations, which treated the subject as an end in itself and not as an adjunct of mechanics. Here Bliss achieved a substantial simplification of the transformation theories of Clebsch and Weierstrass. Bliss also strengthened the necessary conditions of Euler, Weierstrass, Legendre, and Jacobi into sufficient conditions. Bliss set out the canonical formulation and solution of the problem of Bolza with side conditions and variable end-points. Bliss's Lectures more or less constitutes the culmination of the classic calculus of variations of Weierstrass, Hilbert, and Bolza. Subsequent work on variational problems would strike out in new directions, such as Morse theory, optimal control, and dynamic programming.
Bliss also studied singularities of real transformations in the plane.
Publications
- 1925 Calculus of Variations[5]
- 1933 Algebraic Functions[6]
- 1944 Mathematics for Exterior Ballistics
- 1946 Lectures on the Calculus of Variations[7]
References
- MacTutor: Gilbert Ames Bliss. The source for most of this entry.
- Ames' Students at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ "Gilbert Bliss". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
- ^ Bliss, Gilbert Ames (1924). "Algebraic Functions and Their Divisors". The Annals of Mathematics. 26 (1/2). JSTOR: 95–134. doi:10.2307/1967747. ISSN 0003-486X. JSTOR 1967747.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
- ^ "Gilbert Ames Bliss". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 2023-02-09. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
- ^ Dresden, Arnold (1925). "Review: Calculus of Variations by Gilbert Ames Bliss, Carus Monograph no. 1" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 31 (9): 551–554. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1925-04110-5.
- ^ Ritt, J. F. (1935). "Review of Algebraic Functions by Gilbert Ames Bliss". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 41: 9–10. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1935-06014-8.
- ^ Hestenes, M. R. (1947). "Review of Lectures on the calculus of variations by G. A. Bliss". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 53: 462–464. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1947-08793-0.
External links
- National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
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- 1925 G. A. Bliss
- 1929 T. H. Hildebrandt
- 1932 G. H. Hardy
- 1935 Dunham Jackson
- 1938 G. T. Whyburn
- 1941 Saunders Mac Lane
- 1944 R. H. Cameron
- 1947 Paul Halmos
- 1950 Mark Kac
- 1953 E. J. McShane
- 1956 Richard H. Bruck
- 1960 Cornelius Lanczos
- 1963 Philip J. Davis
- 1964 Leon Henkin
- 1965 Jack K. Hale and Joseph P. LaSalle
- 1967 Guido Weiss
- 1968 Mark Kac
- 1970 Shiing-Shen Chern
- 1971 Norman Levinson
- 1972 François Trèves
- 1973 Carl D. Olds
- 1974 Peter D. Lax
- 1975 Martin Davis and Reuben Hersh
- 1976 Lawrence Zalcman
- 1977 W. Gilbert Strang
- 1978 Shreeram S. Abhyankar
- 1979 Neil J. A. Sloane
- 1980 Heinz Bauer
- 1981 Kenneth I. Gross
- 1982 No award given.
- 1983 No award given.
- 1984 R. Arthur Knoebel
- 1985 Carl Pomerance
- 1986 George Miel
- 1987 James H. Wilkinson
- 1988 Stephen Smale
- 1989 Jacob Korevaar
- 1990 David Allen Hoffman
- 1991 W. B. Raymond Lickorish and Kenneth C. Millett
- 1992 Steven G. Krantz
- 1993 David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein and Peter B. Borwein
- 1994 Barry Mazur
- 1995 Donald G. Saari
- 1996 Joan Birman
- 1997 Tom Hawkins
- 1998 Alan Edelman and Eric Kostlan
- 1999 Michael I. Rosen
- 2000 Don Zagier
- 2001 Carolyn S. Gordon and David L. Webb
- 2002 Ellen Gethner, Stan Wagon, and Brian Wick
- 2003 Thomas C. Hales
- 2004 Edward B. Burger
- 2005 John Stillwell
- 2006 Florian Pfender & Günter M. Ziegler
- 2007 Andrew J. Simoson
- 2008 Andrew Granville
- 2009 Harold P. Boas
- 2010 Brian J. McCartin
- 2011 Bjorn Poonen
- 2012 Dennis DeTurck, Herman Gluck, Daniel Pomerleano & David Shea Vela-Vick
- 2013 Robert Ghrist
- 2014 Ravi Vakil
- 2015 Dana Mackenzie
- 2016 Susan H. Marshall & Donald R. Smith
- 2017 Mark Schilling
- 2018 Daniel J. Velleman
- 2019 Tom Leinster
- 2020 Vladimir Pozdnyakov & J. Michael Steele
- 2021 Travis Kowalski
- 2022 William Dunham, Ezra Brown & Matthew Crawford
- 2023 Kimmo Eriksson & Jonas Eliasson
- 2024 Jeffrey Whitmer