Leonard Gillman
| Leonard Gillman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 8, 1917 Cleveland, Ohio |
| Died | April 7, 2009 (aged 92) Austin, Texas |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematician, pianist |
| Institutions | Purdue University, University of Rochester, University of Texas at Austin |
| Alma mater | Juilliard Graduate School of Music, Columbia University |
| Doctoral advisor |
Edgar Lorch Alfred Tarski |
| Known for | Topology |
Leonard E. "Len" Gillman (January 8, 1917 – April 7, 2009) was an American mathematician, emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He was also an accomplished classical pianist.
Gillman was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1917. His family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1922. It was there that he started taking piano lessons at age six. They moved to New York City in 1926, and he began intensive training as a pianist. Upon graduation from high school in 1933, Gillman won a fellowship to the Juilliard Graduate School of Music.
After one semester at Juilliard, he enrolled in evening classes in French and mathematics at Columbia University. He received a diploma in piano from Juilliard in 1938, then continued his studies at Columbia, graduating with a B.S. in mathematics in 1941. He stayed on as a graduate student, and completed the coursework for a mathematics Ph.D. by 1943.
In 1943 Gillman accepted a position at Tufts College, working on a special project for the Navy Department. While there he wrote a thesis based on their work on pursuit curves, and he received his master's degree from Columbia in 1945. He moved to Washington, D.C. where he continued doing Navy work for the Operations Evaluation Group (OEG), affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After five years he took a one-year sabbatical at MIT to write a doctoral thesis. Originally he intended to it to be on game theory, but he happened to read a book by Wacław Sierpiński and became suddenly interested in set theory. With no specialists to advise him, Gillman wrote and published a paper that became his thesis: "On Intervals of Ordered Sets". He also sent the paper to Alfred Tarski, beginning a correspondence that led Tarski to claim Gillman as "my Ph.D. by mail". In 1952 Gillman accepted an instructorship at Purdue University, and in 1953 he finally received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia.
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