Ralph P. Boas, Jr.
| Ralph P. Boas Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 8, 1912 Walla Walla, Washington |
| Died | July 25, 1992 (aged 79) Seattle, Washington |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
Northwestern University Duke University |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | David Widder |
| Doctoral students |
Creighton Buck Philip J. Davis Christopher Imoru Dale Mugler |
| Notable awards | Lester R. Ford Award (1970, 1978) |
Ralph Philip Boas Jr. (August 8, 1912 – July 25, 1992) was a mathematician, teacher, and journal editor. He wrote over 200 papers, mainly in the fields of real and complex analysis.
He was born in Walla Walla, Washington, the son of an English professor at Whitman College, but moved frequently as a child; his younger sister, Marie Boas Hall, later to become a historian of science, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father had become a high school teacher. He was home-schooled until the age of eight, began his formal schooling in the sixth grade, and graduated from high school while still only 15. After a gap year auditing classes at Mount Holyoke College (where his father had become a professor) he entered Harvard, intending to major in chemistry and go into medicine, but ended up studying mathematics instead. His first mathematics publication was written as an undergraduate, after he discovered an incorrect proof in another paper. He got his A.B. degree in 1933, received a Sheldon Fellowship for a year of travel, and returned to Harvard for his doctoral studies in 1934. He earned his doctorate there in 1937, under the supervision of David Widder.
After postdoctoral studies at Princeton University with Salomon Bochner, and then the University of Cambridge in England, he began a two-year instructorship at Duke University, where he met his future wife, Mary Layne, also a mathematics instructor at Duke. They were married in 1941, and when World War II started later that year, Boas moved to the Navy Pre-flight School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 1942, he interviewed for a position in the Manhattan Project, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but ended up returning to Harvard to teach in a Navy instruction program there, while his wife taught at Tufts University.
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