Edward Van Vleck

Edward Burr Van Vleck (June 7, 1863, Middletown, Connecticut – June 3, 1943, Madison, Wisconsin) was an American mathematician.

Van Vleck was born June 7, 1863, Middletown, Connecticut. He was the son of astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck, he graduated from Wesleyan University in 1884, attended Johns Hopkins in 1885-87, and studied at Göttingen (Ph.D., 1893). He also received 1 July 1914 an honorary doctorate of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). He was assistant professor and professor at Wesleyan (1895–1906), and after 1906 a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where the mathematics building is named after him. His doctoral students include H. S. Wall. In 1913 he became president of the American Mathematical Society, of whose Transactions he had been first associate editor (1902–05) and then editor (1905–10). He was the author of Theory of Divergent Series and Algebraic Continued Fractions (1903), and of several monographs in mathematical journals. His son, John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, was a notable physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1977.