Nationality American Name Anatole Beck | Fields Mathematics Doctoral advisor Shizuo Kakutani | |
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Born 19 March 1930
New York City ( 1930-03-19 ) Died December 21, 2014, Madison, Wisconsin, United States Books Excursions Into Mathematics Alma mater Yale University, Brooklyn College | ||
Anatole Beck (19 March 1930 – 21 December 2014) was an American mathematician.
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Beck graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1947, studied at Brooklyn College (Bachelor's degree 1951) and in 1956 received his PhD from Yale University under Shizuo Kakutani PhD (On the Random Ergodic theorem). In 1958 he became Assistant Professor and in 1966 Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He was a visiting professor at the Technical University of Munich, the London School of Economics and a visiting scholar at the University of Göttingen, University of Warwick, University of London, and the Hebrew University.
Beck's work dealt with ergodic theory, topological dynamics, Probability in Banach spaces, measure theory, search theory, linear search problem, and mathematics in the social sciences.
Union leadership, political activism and social commentator
Beck was an ardent supporter of unionism and cooperative economics, helping to found the faculty union chapter at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and serving as the Vice President of the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers. He spoke out strongly in favor of academic freedom on campus, and was an early supporter of the free speech rights of the movement against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Since 2008 he had been a commentator on the Insurgent Radio Kiosk on Madison's community radio station WORT.
In 2009 Beck was interviewed extensively by Robert Lange for the UW-Madison Oral History Program.