Hassler Whitney - Career, Work, Family

Mathematician, born in New York City, New York, USA. Noted for his work in topology analysis, he joined the Princeton faculty (1933) and became a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (1977). A member of the National Academy of Sciences, awarded the National Medal of Science (1976), he specialized in manifolds, integration theory, and analytic varieties.

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;

Career

Instructor, Mathematics, Harvard University, 1930-31, 1933-35; NRC Fellow, Mathematics, 1931-33; Chairman of the Mathematics Panel, National Science Foundation, 1953-56; 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.

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 Reviews, 1949-54; Steele Prize, 1985, American Mathematical Society; American National Council Teachers of Mathematics, Swiss Mathematics Society (Honorary), Académie des Sciences (Foreign Associate);

Work

Whitney's earliest work, from 1930 to 1933, was on graph theory. His work in graph theory culminated in a 1935 paper, where he laid the foundations for matroids, a fundamental notion in modern combinatorics and representation theory.

Whitney's lifelong interest in geometric properties of functions also began around this time.

In a 1936 paper, Whitney gave a definition of a "smooth manifold of class C, and immersed in R. 2, by a technique that has come to be known as the "Whitney trick.") This basic result shows that manifolds may be treated intrinsically or extrinsically, as we wish. 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.

He was one of the major developers of cohomology theory, and characteristic classes, as these concepts emerged in the late 1930s, and his work on algebaic topology continued into the 40s.

Whitney had, throughout the 1950s, an almost unique interest in the topology of singular spaces and in singularities of smooth maps. Whitney was the first to see that any subtlety in this definition, and pointed out that a good "stratification" should satisfy conditions he termed "A" and "B". The singularities in low dimension of smooth mappings, later to come to prominence in the work of René 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 and later inspired the generalization found by Jenny Harrison.

These aspects of Whitney’s work have looked more unified, in retrospect and with the general development of singularity theory.

Family

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 &

Married Margaret R.